UNIVERSITY  OF 
CALIFORNIA 

SAN  DIEGO 


THE  WORLD 
OF  H.  G.  WELLS 


ET  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 

THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 
JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

THE  WINE  OF  THE  PURITANS 

A  Study  of  Present-Day  America 

THE  MALADY  OF  THE  IDEAL 


THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 


BY 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 


NEW  YORK 

MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 

MCMXV 


COPYRIGHT,  1915,  BY 
MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 


PRINTED  IN  AMERICA 


To 

Max  Lippitt  Larkin 


CONTENTS 


Introduction  9 

I.     The  First  Phase  19 

II.     Towards  Socialism  40 

III.     Socialism  "True  and  False"  61 

IV.     The  Philosophy  of  the  New  Re- 
publican 88 

V.     Human  Nature  106 

VI.     A  Personal  Chapter  130 

VII.     The  Spirit  of  Wells  153 


THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

INTRODUCTION 

A  NATURAL  pause  appears  to  have 
come  in  the  career  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells. 
After  so  many  years  of  travelling  up  and  down 
through  time  and  space,  familiarizing  himself 
with  all  the  various  parts  of  the  solar  system 
and  presenting  himself  imaginatively  at  all  the 
various  geological  epochs,  from  the  Stone  Age 
to  the  end  of  the  world,  he  has  for  good  and 
all  domesticated  himself  in  his  own  planet  and 
point  of  time.  This  gradual  process  of  slow- 
ing down,  so  to  speak,  had  been  evident  from 
the  moment  of  his  first  appearance.  The  most 
obvious  fact  about  his  romances  of  science,  con- 
sidered as  a  series,  is  that  each  one  more  nearly 
approached  the  epoch  in  which  we  live,  and  the 
realities  of  this  epoch.  From  the  year  A.  D. 
802,701,  witnessed  in  his  first  romance  by  the 
Time  Traveller,  we  found  ourselves  at  last  in 
the  presence  of  a  decade  only  so  remote  as  that 

9 


10     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

of  the  war  which  has  now  befallen  Europe.  A 
similar  tendency  in  his  novels  has  been  equally 
marked.  The  possibilities  of  science  and  so- 
cialism have  received  a  diminishing  attention 
relatively  beside  the  possibilities  of  human  re- 
action to  science  and  socialism.  It  is  indi- 
vidual men  and  women,  and  the  motives  and 
personalities  of  individual  men  and  women, 
which  now  concern  him.  Still  retaining  the  en- 
tire planet  as  the  playground  of  his  ideas,  still 
upholding  science  and  socialism  as  his  essen- 
tial heroes,  he  has  been  driven  by  experience  to 
approach  these  things  through  human  nature 
as  it  is.  In  a  recent  essay  he  has  told  us  not 
to  expect  any  more  dramatic  novelties :  for  the 
present  at  any  rate  our  business  must  be  to 
make  science  and  socialism  feel  at  home. 
Whether  or  not  this  may  stand  as  a  general 
diagnosis  of  our  epoch,  it  is  a  remarkable  con- 
fession with  regard  to  his  own  place  in  it.  For 
it  signifies  nothing  less  than  that  he  has 
reached  the  limit  of  his  own  circle  of  ideas  and 
finished  his  own  pioneering,  and  that  his  work 
for  the  future  will  be  to  relate  the  discoveries 
of  his  youth  with  human  experience.  He  is  no 


INTRODUCTION  11 

longer  a  "new  voice";  his  work  belongs,  for 
good  or  ill,  to  history  and  literature,  and  he 
presents  himself  from  this  time  forward  as  a 
humanist. 

In  this  new  posture  Wells  does  not  stand 
alone.  He  is  typical  of  an  entire  generation 
of  Englishmen  that  knows  not  Oxford,  a  gen- 
eration which  has  heen  busy  with  all  manner  of 
significant  movements  and  discoveries,  too 
busy  indeed  to  relate  them  to  the  common  rea- 
son of  humankind.  During  these  years  the 
word  "academic"  has  been  outlawed;  naturally 
so,  for  the  academic  mind  is  to  the  creative 
mind  what  the  digestive  system  is  to  the  hu- 
man body:  a  period  of  energetic  exercise  must 
precede  its  operation.  But  in  order  that  ideas 
may  be  incorporated  in  society  they  must  sub- 
mit themselves  at  the  right  moment  to  those 
digestive  processes  by  which  they  are  liquefied 
and  transmitted  through  the  veins  to  all  the 
various  members  of  the  common  organism. 

During  the  last  twenty  years  modern 
thought  has  been  dominated  to  an  extraordi- 
nary degree  by  men  who  have  been  educated 
solely  through  the  movements  in  which  they 


12    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

have  taken  part:  seldom  has  there  been  so  uni- 
versal and  so  hectic  an  empiricism.  But  this 
is  the  way  the  earth  moves.  Like  an  inchworm 
it  doubles  itself  up  at  intervals  and  then  grad- 
ually stretches  itself  straight  again.  The 
whole  nineteenth  century,  according  to  Taine, 
was  occupied  in  working  out  two  or  three  ideas 
concocted  in  Germany  during  the  Napoleonic 
era.  History  is  a  succession  of  Gothic  inva- 
sions and  academic  subversions.  It  marks  the 
end  of  one  of  those  eras  which  perpetually 
overlap  one  another  in  various  groups  of  men 
and  cycles  of  thought  that  our  own  Visigoths 
have  capitulated.  As  the  pressure  of  their 
own  immediate  points  of  view  relaxes  and  they 
cease  to  identify  their  own  progress  with  the 
progress  of  men  in  general,  they  become  per- 
haps less  striking  but  certainly  more  useful. 

Intensely  preoccupied  with  contemporary 
ideas  and  inventions,  brilliantly  gifted  and  full 
of  life,  these  leaders  of  thought  were  more  in- 
nocent of  literature  and  history  than  a  fresh- 
man. Both  Wells  and  Bernard  Shaw  have 
confessed  that  throughout  their  most  active 
intellectual  careers  they  believed  instinctively 


INTRODUCTION  13 

that  progress  was  mainly  a  matter  of  chronol- 
ogy. To  discover  the  future  Wells  considered 
it  necessary  merely  to  set  his  imagination  at 
work  on  Chicago  and  multiply  it  by  a  thou- 
sand; while  the  famous  remark  of  Shaw  that 
he  was  "better  than  Shakespeare"  sprang  from 
his  assumption  that,  living  three  centuries  later, 
he  naturally  stood  (as  a  dwarf,  in  his  own 
phrase)  upon  Shakespeare's  shoulders.  This 
naivete  placed  them  at  the  mercy  of  literature, 
as  they  soon  discovered.  Everyone  knows  the 
change  that  came  over  Bernard  Shaw's  cosmos 
when  for  the  first  time,  a  few  years  ago,  he 
read  two  or  three  pre-  Darwinian  philosophers : 
one  could  almost  have  heard  a  pin  drop  when 
he  stopped  talking  about  being  better  than 
Shakespeare.  A  similar  experience,  exhibited 
in  his  books,  has  befallen  Wells,  and  there  is 
no  doubt  that  reading  has  contributed  to  the 
progressive  modesty  of  his  point  of  view. 
Each  monument  of  historic  experience  that  he 
has  absorbed  has  left  its  mark  on  him.  Rabe- 
lais, Machiavelli,  Plato,  incorporated  at  regu- 
lar intervals  in  his  own  work,  have  certainly 


14     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

contributed  to  make  him  less  agile  and  less 
dramatic. 

Let  us  take  advantage  of  these  post-pran- 
dial moments  to  survey  some  of  the  remark- 
able ideas  which  have  been  added  to  the  gen- 
eral stock  during  this  period.  After  the  fash- 
ion of  Cato,  Bernard  Shaw  and  H.  G.  Wells 
have  come  late  to  the  study  of  Greek.  Ber- 
nard Shaw  read  Plato  at  fifty,  and  in  his  latest 
book  Wells  has  insisted  that  in  the  Great  State 
everyone  will  study  Greek.  Nothing  could 
signify  more  plainly  that  these  outriders  of 
the  Modern  Mind  have  come  to  a  halt  and  wish 
to  connect  themselves  with  tradition,  with  his- 
tory, with  literature,  with  religion,  with  the 
grand  current  of  human  experience.  Having 
been  for  so  long  experimenting  with  new  and 
untried  forces,  sharply  separated  from  what 
is  received  and  understood,  they  should  be  re- 
lated to  the  familiar  landmarks  and  connected 
with  the  main  stream  of  English  thought  and 
literature. 

Grotesque  and  violent  as  it  may  at  first  ap- 
pear, I  believe  that  in  the  future  Wells  will  be 
thought  of  as  having  played  toward  his  own 


INTRODUCTION  15 

epoch  a  part  very  similar  to  that  played  by 
Matthew  Arnold.  I  say  this  with  full  recogni- 
tion of  their  remoteness  in  personal  quality, 
recognizing  also  the  difference  in  their  direct 
objects  of  attack,  in  the  precise  causes  they 
uphold.  One  thinks  of  these  two  vivid  person- 
alities— Wells — how  shall  one  picture  him? — 
and  Matthew  Arnold,  that  superb  middle-class 
gentleman  with  his  great  face  and  deprecating 
hands — and  the  comparison  is  instantly  ludi- 
crous. In  reality  the  entire  trend  of  Arnold's 
social  criticism  was  anti-individualistic  and  in 
a  straight  line  with  socialism.  Seen  retrospec- 
tively the  main  work  of  Wells  has  not  been  to 
promote  any  intellectual  or  economic  doctrine, 
but  to  alter  the  English  frame  of  mind.  The 
function  of  each  of  these  men  has  been  to  bring 
home  to  the  English  mind  a  range  of  ideas  not 
traditional  in  it. 

Indeed  this  comparison  holds  (the  shock 
once  over)  not  merely  with  regard  to  their 
general  function,  but  in  their  specific  attitude 
toward  most  of  the  branches  of  thought  and 
action  they  have  concerned  themselves  with. 
Wells  on  Education,  on  Criticism,  on  Politics 


16     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

and  the  nostrums  of  Liberalism,  Wells  even  on 
Religion  continues  the  propaganda  of  Arnold. 
Everywhere  in  these  so  superficially  dissimilar 
writings  is  exhibited  the  same  fine  dissatisfac- 
tion, the  same  faith  in  ideas  and  standards,  the 
same  dislike  of  heated  bungling,  plunging,  wil- 
f ulness,  and  confusion ;  even  the  same  predom- 
inant contempt  for  most  things  that  are,  the 
same  careful  vagueness  of  ideal.  It  was  Ar- 
nold who  passed  his  life  in  trying  to  make 
England  believe  in  and  act  upon  ideas  instead 
of  "muddling  through,"  who  never  wearied  of 
holding  up  the  superiority  of  everything 
French  and  everything  German  to  everything 
English,  who  adopted  into  his  own  language 
that  phrase  about  "seeing  things  as  in  them- 
selves they  really  are."  Read  his  chapter  on 
Our  Liberal  Practitioners  and  you  will  find 
the  precise  attitude  of  Wells  toward  the  pre- 
mature inadequate  doing  of  things  rather  than 
the  continued  research,  experiment,  and  disci- 
pline which  lead  to  right  fulfilments.  Who 
urged  the  ventilation  of  life,  affairs,  conduct 
in  the  light  of  world  experience?  Who 
preached  the  gospel  of  reasonableness,  mutual 


INTRODUCTION  17 

understanding,  and  more  light?  Who  spurred 
England  to  cultivate  the  virtue  of  intellectual 
curiosity?  Who  believed  with  a  paradoxical 
passion  in  coolness  and  detachment?  In  each 
of  these  things  what  Arnold  was  to  his  genera- 
tion Wells  remarkably  has  been  to  ours.  Dif- 
fering in  their  view  of  the  substance  of  relig- 
ion, their  conception  of  the  Church  as  a  great 
common  receptacle  for  the  growing  experience 
of  the  race  is  precisely  the  same,  fragmenta- 
tion, segregation,  sectarianism  being  to  both 
of  them  in  this  matter  the  greatest  of  evils. 
The  love  of  curiosity,  centrality,  ventilation, 
detachment,  common  understanding,  coolness 
and  reasonableness  and  a  realistic  vision,  the 
dislike  of  confusion,  bungling,  wilfulness,  in- 
competence, hot-headedness,  complacency,  sec- 
tarianism— these  are  quite  fundamental  traits, 
and  Arnold  and  Wells  share  them  in  a  remark- 
able degree.  It  is  quite  true  that  Arnold  lived 
in  a  universe  which  only  with  some  reluctance 
confessed  to  three  dimensions,  while  that  of 
Wells  trembles  with  the  coming  of  a  fourth. 
But  in  any  case  it  is  worth  while  to  release  a 
phenomenon  like  Wells  from  the  medium  of 


18     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

purely  contemporary  influences,  and  for  this 
purpose  it  is  convenient  to  see  a  socialist  in 
the  light  of  a  man  who  knew  nothing  of  so- 
cialism, to  see  that  socialism  is  itself  a  natural 
outgrowth  of  those  "best  things  that  have 
been  thought  and  said  in  the  world."  It 
is  important  to  realize  that  the  train  of  thought 
and  the  circle  of  ideas  of  this  man  are  con- 
nected with  a  well-recognized  branch  of  intel- 
lectual tradition.  And  even  socialism  is  bene- 
fitted  by  having  friends  at  court. 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  FIRST   PHASE 

"TAM,  by  a  sort  of  predestination,  a  social- 
A  ist,"  Wells  wrote  once.  And  everything 
one  can  say  of  him  serves  merely  to  explain, 
justify,  qualify,  illuminate  and  refine  that 
statement. 

First  of  all  it  implies  a  certain  disposition 
and  certain  habits  of  mind,  habits  of  mind 
which  are  all  to  be  found  in  the  first  phase  of 
his  work,  in  those  marvellous  tales  of  Time  and 
Space  that  won  him  his  original  sensational 
fame.  It  is  this  disposition  behind  them,  this 
quality  they  have  as  of  an  inevitable  attitude 
toward  life  and  the  world,  which  distinguishes 
them  at  once  from  those  other  superficially  sim- 
ilar tales  of  Jules  Verne.  The  marvels  of 
Jules  Verne  are  just  marvels,  delightful,  ir- 
responsible plunderings  from  a  helpless  uni- 
verse. To  the  grown-up  mind  they  have  a  little 

19 


20    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

of  that  pathetic  futility  one  associates  with  a 
millionaire's  picture-gallery,  where  all  sorts  of 
things  have  been  brought  together,  without 
any  exercise  of  inevitable  personal  choice,  be- 
cause they  are  expensive.  I  don't  know  that 
the  tales  of  Wells  are  better  tales,  but  they 
have  that  ulterior  synthetic  quality  that  be- 
longs to  all  real  expressions  of  personality. 
Wells  was  never  merely  inventive;  his  inven- 
tion was  the  first  stage  of  an  imaginative 
growth. 

Now  the  quality  that  pervades  all  these  early 
writings  is  what  may  be  called  a  sense  of  the 
infinite  plasticity  of  things.  He  conceived  a 
machine  that  could  travel  through  time,  a  man 
who  found  a  way  to  become  invisible,  a  drug 
that  made  men  float  like  balloons,  another  drug 
that  enabled  men  to  live  a  thousand  hours  in 
one,  a  crystal  egg  through  which  one  could 
watch  the  life  in  Mars,  a  man  who  could  stop 
the  sun  like  Joshua,  a  food  that  turned  men 
into  giants,  a  biologist  who  discovered  a 
method  of  carving  animals  into  men,  an  angel 
who  visited  a  rural  vicar,  a  mermaid  who  came 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  21 

to  earth  in  search  of  a  soul,  a  homicidal  orchid, 
a  gigantic  bird  hatched  from  a  prehistoric  egg, 
a  man  who  passed  outside  space.  In  short,  the 
universe  appeared  to  him  like  that  magic  shop 
of  which  he  also  wrote,  where  the  most  aston- 
ishing things  may  happen,  if  you  are  the  Right 
Sort  of  Boy. 

If  all  this  implies  anything  it  implies  that 
things  in  general  are  not  fixed  and  static,  but 
that  they  are,  on  the  contrary,  infinitely  plastic, 
malleable,  capable  of  responding  to  any  pur- 
pose, any  design  you  may  set  working  among 
them.  The  universe,  it  seems  to  assume,  may 
be  and  quite  possibly  is  proceeding  after  some 
logical  method  of  its  own,  but  so  far  as  man  is 
concerned  this  method  appears  to  be  one  of 
chance.  Obviously,  man  can  do  the  most  sur- 
prising things  in  it,  can  take  as  it  were  all  sorts 
of  liberties  with  it.  The  universe,  in  short,  is 
like  a  vacant  field  which  may  or  may  not  be- 
long to  some  absent  landlord  who  has  designs 
of  his  own  upon  it ;  but  until  this  absent  land- 
lord appears  and  claims  his  field,  all  the  chil- 
dren in  the  neighborhood  can  build  huts  in  it 


22     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

and  play  games  upon  it  and,  in  a  word,  for  all 
practical  purposes,  consider  it  their  own. 

This  idea  of  the  relation  between  free  will 
and  determinism  is  the  underlying  assumption 
of  Wells,  as  he  explains  it  in  First  and  Last 
Things: 

Take  life  at  the  level  of  common  sensations  and  com- 
mon experience  and  there  is  no  more  indisputable  fact 
than  man's  freedom  of  will,  unless  it  is  his  complete 
moral  responsibility.  But  make  only  the  least  penetrat- 
ing of  scientific  analyses  and  you  perceive  a  world  of 
inevitable  consequences,  a  rigid  succession  of  cause  and 
effect. 

And  elsewhere  he  says: 

On  the  scientific  plane  one  is  a  fatalist.  .  .  .  But 
does  the  whole  universe  of  fact,  the  external  world 
about  me,  the  mysterious  internal  world  from  which  my 
motives  rise,  form  one  rigid  and  fated  system  as  Deter- 
minists  teach?  I  incline  to  that  belief.  .  .  .  From 
me  as  a  person  this  theory  of  predestination  has  no  prac- 
tical value.  ...  I  hesitate,  I  choose  just  as  though 
the  thing  was  unknowable.  For  me  and  my  conduct 
there  is  that  much  wide  practical  margin  of  freedom. 
I  am  free  and  freely  and  responsibly  making  the  future 
— so  far  as  I  am  concerned. 

In  a  word,  for  all  the  purposes  that  affect 
man's  need  the  universe  is  infinitely  plastic  and 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  23 

amenable  to  his  will.  Like  every  clean-cut 
philosophical  conception,  this  clears  the  ground 
for  practical  conduct  and  a  certain  sort  of  di- 
rect action. 

There  was  a  time,  no  doubt,  when  he  shared 
the  old  Utopian  folly  of  expecting  a  sudden 
and  unanimous  change  of  human  will.  When 
the  universe  appears  as  unconventional  as  it 
used  to  appear  to  Wells,  there  can  surely  be  no 
reason  to  think  it  impossible,  after  a  comet  has 
collided  with  the  world,  for  the  human  race  to 
become  suddenly  Utopian.  Generally  speak- 
ing, comets  do  not  collide  with  the  world,  and 
in  the  same  way  men  are  slow  to  change.  But 
certainly  if  Wells  ever  thought  of  humanity  as 
merely  a  multiplication  of  one  pattern,  cer- 
tainly if  he  has  long  since  abandoned  the  idea 
of  our  all  turning  over  a  new  leaf  one  fine 
morning,  he  has  never  lost  his  faith  in  free  will 
as  regards  the  individual.  He  has  always  be- 
lieved in  the  personal  doctrine  of  summarily 
"making  an  end  to  things"  as  distinguished 
from  the  old-fashioned  doctrine  of  "making  the 
best  of  things" ;  and  there  is  nothing  more  mod- 


24    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

ern  about  him  than  his  aversion  to  the  good  old 
English  theory  of  "muddling  through." 

Mr.  Polly  is  a  good  example  of  his  view  of 
personal  direct  action,  the  getting  rid,  quickly 
and  decisively,  of  a  situation  that  has  only  sen- 
timent to  save  it  from  complete  demoralization. 
"When  a  man  has  once  broken  through  the 
wall  of  every-day  circumstances,"  he  remarks  at 
the  moment  of  the  Polly  debacle,  "he  has  made 
a  discovery.  If  the  world  does  not  please  you, 
you  can  change  it.  Determine  to  alter  it  at  any 
price,  and  you  can  change  it  altogether."  Mr. 
Polly  sets  fire  to  his  shop,  takes  to  the  road  and 
repairs  his  digestion.  Desertion  of  duty  and 
the  quick  repudiation  of  entanglements  make 
him  healthy  and  sensible  and  give  him  a  sense 
of  purpose  in  things.  And  I  know  of  nothing 
in  all  Wells  that  is  described  with  more  relish 
than  that  Beltane  festival  which  occurs  toward 
the  end  of  In  the  Days  of  the  Comet.  The 
world's  great  age  has  begun  anew,  and  the  en- 
lightened men  of  the  new  time  revive  the  May 
Day  of  old  in  order  to  burn  the  useless  trap- 
pings of  the  past.  They  heap  old  carpets  on 
the  fire,  ill-designed  furniture,  bad  music  and 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  25 

cheap  pictures,  stuffed  birds,  obsolete  school- 
books,  dog-eared  penny  fiction,  sham  shoes, 
and  all  the  corrugated  iron  in  the  world ;  every 
tangible  thing  that  is  useless,  false,  disorderly, 
accidental,  obsolete,  and  tawdry  to  celebrate 
the  beginning  of  things  that  are  clean,  beauti- 
ful, and  worthy.  Sceptical,  hesitant,  and  per- 
sonal as  Wells  has  become,  that  indicates  a 
strong  primitive  mental  trait.  Philosophy  does 
not  spring  out  of  the  brain;  we  hate  the  hateful 
things  of  our  own  experience,  just  as  we  think 
the  things  we  desire.  And  though  there  are 
nine  and  sixty  ways  of  being  a  socialist,  they 
all  unite  in  a  certain  sense  of  the  plasticity  and 
malleability  of  things  human,  a  certain  faith  in 
the  possibility  of  asserting  order  in  the  midst 
of  disorder  and  intelligently  cleaning  house. 

Inherent  in  this  trait  is  another — detach- 
ment. You  only  become  aware  of  confusion 
when  you  stand  free  of  it,  when  you  cease  to 
be  a  part  of  it.  And  of  all  writers  who  have 
so  immediately  felt  life  I  doubt  if  there  has 
been  one  so  detached  as  Wells.  The  mental 
detachment  of  his  early  tales  is  a  detachment 
half  scientific,  half  artistic;  scientific  as  of  one 


26     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

who  sees  things  experimentally  in  their  ma- 
terial, molecular  aspect,  artistic  as  of  one  con- 
scious of  moulding  will  and  placed  amid  plastic 
material.  Thus,  for  example,  he  sees  human 
beings  quite  stripped  of  their  distinctively  hu- 
man qualities;  he  sees  men  anatomically,  as  in 
that  passage  where  the  Invisible  Man,  killed 
with  a  spade,  becomes  visible  again  as  a  corpse : 

Everyone  saw,  faint  and  transparent  as  though  it 
were  made  of  glass,  so  that  veins  and  arteries  and  bones 
and  nerves  could  be  distinguished,  the  outline  of  a  hand, 
a  hand  limp  and  prone.  It  grew  clouded  and  opaque 
even  as  they  stared.  .  .  .  And  so,  slowly,  beginning 
at  his  hands  and  feet  and  creeping  along  his  limbs  to 
the  vital  centres  of  his  body,  that  strange  change  con- 
tinued. First  came  the  little  white  nerves,  a  hazy  gray 
stretch  of  a  limb,  then  the  glossy  bones  and  intricate 
arteries,  then  the  flesh  and  skin,  first  a  faint  fogginess, 
then  growing  rapidly  dense  and  opaque. 

Similar  is  a  passage  in  A  Story  of  the  Days 
to  Come>  where  he  describes  an  ordinary 
breakfast  of  our  own  day:  "the  rude  masses 
of  bread  needing  to  be  carved  and  smeared 
over  with  animal  fat  before  they  could  be 
made  palatable,  the  still  recognizable  frag- 
ments of  recently  killed  animals,  hideously 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  27 

charred  and  hacked."  That  surely  is  quite  as  a 
man  from  another  planet,  or  a  chemist  after  a 
long  day's  work  in  the  laboratory,  would  view 
our  familiar  human  things.  And  one  recalls 
another  sentence  from  Kipps  where  this  de- 
tachment links  itself  with  a  deeper  social  in- 
sight and  hints  at  the  part  it  had  come  to  play 
in  Wells's  later  mind:  "I  see  through  the 
darkness,"  he  says,  toward  the  end  of  the  book, 
"the  souls  of  my  Kippses  as  they  are,  as  little 
pink  strips  of  quivering,  living  stuff f  as  things 
like  the  bodies  of  little  ill-nourished,  ailing,  ig- 
norant children — children  who  feel  pain,  who 
are  naughty  and  muddled  and  suffer,  and  do 
not  understand  why." 

And  just  as  he  sees  men  and  human  things 
chemically  and  anatomically,  so  he  sees  the 
world  astronomically.  He  has  that  double 
quality  (like  his  own  Mr.  Bessel)  of  being 
bodily  very  active  in  life  and  at  the  same  time 
watching  it  from  a  great  distance.  In  his  lat- 
est book  he  has  figured  a  god  looking  on  from 
the  clouds;  and  there  is  nothing  in  his  novels 
more  stimulating  and  more  uncanny  than  a 
certain  faculty  of  telescoping  his  view  sud- 


28     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

denly  from  the  very  little  to  the  very  large, 
expanding  and  contracting  his  vision  of  things 
at  will.  You  find  the  germ  of  this  faculty 
in  his  early  tales.  Looking  down  as  though 
from  a  balloon  he  sees  the  world  as  a  planet, 
as  a  relatively  small  planet.  In  doing  so  he 
maintains  at  first  a  purely  scientific  set  of 
values;  he  is  not  led,  as  he  has  since  been  led, 
and  as  Leopardi  was  led  by  the  same  imagi- 
native experience,  to  adopt  poetical  values 
and  to  feel  acutely  the  littleness  and  the  pow- 
erlessness  of  man.  His  values  remain  scien- 
tific, and  the  absurdity  he  feels  is  the  absurdity 
an  astronomer  must  feel,  that  in  so  small 
a  space  men  can  vaunt  themselves  and  squab- 
ble with  one  another.  Race  prejudice,  for 
example,  necessarily  appears  to  him  as  fool- 
ish as  it  would  appear  to  ordinary  eyes 
among  insects  that  happen  to  be  swarming  on 
a  fallen  apple.  Once  you  get  it  into  your  mind 
that  the  world  is  a  ball  in  space,  you  find  a  pe- 
culiar silliness  in  misunderstandings  on  that 
ball.  This  reflection  has  led  to  many  views  of 
life;  in  Wells  it  led  to  a  sense  of  the  need  of 
human  solidarity. 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  29 

And  solidarity  implies  order.  The  sense  of 
order  is  one  of  those  instincts  exhibited  every- 
where in  the  writings  of  Wells  that  serve  as 
preliminaries  to  his  social  philosophy.  There 
is  a  passage  in  Kipps  where  he  pictures  the  sat- 
isfactions of  shopkeeping  to  an  elect  soul: 
"There  is,  of  course,  nothing  on  earth,"  he  says, 
"and  I  doubt  at  times  if  there  is  a  joy  in 
heaven,  like  starting  a  small  haberdasher's 
shop.  Imagine,  for  example,  having  a  drawer- 
ful  of  tapes,  or  again,  an  array  of  neat,  large 
packages,  each  displaying  one  sample  of  hooks 
and  eyes.  Think  of  your  cottons,  your  drawer 
of  colored  silks,"  etc.  De  Foe  knew  a  similar 
satisfaction  and  has  pictured  it  in  Robinson 
Crusoe.  De  Foe  was  himself  a  shopkeeper, 
just  as  Wells  has  been  in  one  of  his  incarna- 
tions; and  he  knew  that  good  shopkeeping  is 
the  microcosm  of  all  good  political  economy. 
The  satisfaction  of  a  thoroughly  competent 
man  who  is  thrown  on  a  desert  island,  and  sets 
to  work  to  establish  upon  it  a  political  economy 
for  one,  is  a  satisfaction  by  itself.  That  cer- 
tainly is  a  primitive  relish,  and  it  is  one  of  the 
first  gestures  of  Wells's  sociology. 


30     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Now  the  sense  of  solidarity,  the  sense  of  or- 
der, implies  the  subordination  of  details,  the 
discipline  of  constituent  units.  Only  in  his 
later  works  did  Wells  begin  to  consider  the 
problems  of  the  individual  life;  in  his  novels 
he  has  considered  them  almost  exclusively,  but 
always  in  relation  to  the  constructive  purpose 
of  society  and  as  what  may  be  called  human 
reservations  from  it.  The  telescope  has  been 
adjusted  to  a  close  range,  and  the  wider  rela- 
tionships are  neither  so  emphasized  nor  so  easily 
discerned.  Nevertheless  it  is  still  the  world 
that  matters  to  Wells — the  world,  the  race,  the 
future ;  not  the  individual  human  being.  And 
if,  relatively,  he  has  become  more  interested  in 
the  individual  and  less  in  the  world,  that  is  be- 
cause he  is  convinced  that  the  problems  of  the 
world  can  best  be  approached  through  the 
study  of  individuals.  His  philosophy  has 
grown  less  abstract  in  harmony  with  his  own 
experience;  but  the  first  sketch  of  his  view  of 
human  nature  and  its  function  is  to  be  found 
crudely  outlined  in  the  scientific  romances. 
How  does  it  figure  there? 

The  human  beings  who  flit  through  these 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  31 

early  tales  are  all  inconspicuous  little  men, 
whose  private  existence  is  of  no  account,  and 
who  exist  to  discover,  invent,  perform  all  sorts 
of  wonderful  experiments  which  almost  invari- 
ably result  in  their  summary  and  quite  unim- 
portant destruction.  They  are  merely,  in  the 
most  complete  sense,  experiments  in  the  col- 
lective purpose,  and  their  creator  has  toward 
them  just  the  attitude  of  an  anatomist  toward 
the  animals  upon  which  he  is  experimenting; 
not  indifferent  to  their  suffering  as  suffering, 
but  ignoring  it  in  the  spirit  of  scientific  detach- 
ment necessary  to  subordinate  means  to  an  end. 
"I  wanted — it  was  the  only  thing  I  wanted — to 
find  out  the  limit  of  plasticity  in  a  living  form," 
says  Dr.  Moreau  in  his  confession;  "and  the 
study  has  made  me  as  remorseless  as  nature." 

Invariably  these  experiments  in  human  pos-; 
sibility,  placed  in  a  world  where  charity  is  not 
so  strong  as  fear,  die  quite  horribly.  Dr. 
Moreau  is  destroyed  by  the  beasts  he  is  at- 
tempting to  vivisect  into  the  semblance  of  men, 
the  Invisible  Man  is  battered  to  death  with  a 
spade,  the  Visiting  Angel  burns  to  death  in  at- 
tempting to  carry  out  his  celestial  errand,  the 


32     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

man  who  travels  to  the  moon  cannot  get  back 
alive.  Does  not  all  this  foreshadow  the  burden 
of  the  later  novels,  that  the  individual  who 
plans  and  wills  for  the  race  is  destroyed  and 
broken  by  the  jealousy,  prejudice  and  inertia  in 
men  and  the  blind  immemorial  forces  of  nature 
surging  through  himself?  These  are  the  forces 
that  are  figured,  in  the  early  tales,  by  that  hor- 
rible hostile  universe  of  nature,  and  the  little  in- 
trepid men  moving  about  in  the  midst  of  it. 
And  the  mind  of  Wells  is  always  prepared  for 
the  consequences  of  what  it  engenders.  The 
inevitable  result  of  creating  an  imaginary 
world  of  malignant  vegetables  .ind  worse  than 
antediluvian  monsters  is  that  the  imaginary 
men  you  also  create  shall  suffer  through  them. 
You  reverse  the  order  of  evolution  and  return 
men  to  conditions  where  life  is  cheap.  An 
imagination  which  has  accustomed  itself  to  run- 
ning loose  among  planets  and  falling  stars, 
which  has  lived  habitually  in  a  universe  where 
worlds  battle  with  one  another,  is  prepared  to 
stomach  a  little  needless  bloodshed.  The  in- 
flexible pursuit  of  an  end  implies  the  sacrifice 
of  means,  and  if  your  experiment  happens  to 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  33 

be  an  invisible  man  you  will  produce  the  invisi- 
bility even  though  it  kills  the  man. 

Widen  the  range  and  this  proposition  logi- 
cally transmutes  itself  into  a  second:  if  your 
experiment  happens  to  be  an  orderly  society 
you  will  produce  order  at  the  expense  of  every- 
thing that  represents  disorder.  And  from  the 
point  of  view  of  a  collective  purpose,  ends,  mo- 
tives and  affections  that  are  private  and  have 
no  collective  significance  represent  disorder. 
Now  the  whole  purpose  of  Wells's  later  work 
has  been  to  illuminate  and  refine  this  proposi- 
tion. He  has  flatly  distinguished  between  two 
sorts  of  human  nature,  the  constructive,  experi- 
mental sort  which  lives  essentially  for  the  race, 
and  the  acquiescent,  ineffectual  sort  which  lives 
essentially  for  itself  or  the  established  fact; 
and  he  gives  to  his  experimental  men  and  wom- 
en an  almost  unlimited  charter  to  make  ducks 
and  drakes  of  the  ineffectual.  Think  of  the 
long  list  of  dead  and  wounded  in  his  novels — 
Mr.  Pope,  Mr.  Stanley,  Mr.  Magnet,  Mr. 
Manning,  Margaret,  Marion — and  you  realize 
how  much  of  a  certain  cruelty,  a  certain  ruth- 


34     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

lessness  is  in  the  very  nature  of  his  philosophy 
of  experimental  direct  action. 

Another  primitive  relish  exhibited  in  these 
early  tales  is  the  delight  of  constructing  things. 
The  Time  Machine,  for  example,  is  the  work 
of  a  mind  that  immoderately  enjoys  inventing, 
erecting,  and  putting  things  together;  and 
there  is  not  much  difference  between  construct- 
ing an  imaginary  machine  and  constructing  an 
imaginary  society.  If  Wells's  early  Utopian 
speculations  are  ingenious  impossibilities,  are 
they  any  more  or  less  so  than  his  mechanical 
speculations?  One  doesn't  begin  life  with  an 
overwhelming  recognition  of  the  obstacles  one 
may  encounter — one  doesn't  fret  too  much 
about  the  possible,  the  feasible,  or  even  the  logi- 
cal. It  was  enough  for  Wells  that  he  had  built 
his  Time  Machine,  though  the  logic  by  which 
the  Time  Traveller  explains  his  process  is  a 
logic  that  gives  me,  at  least,  a  sense  of  helpless, 
blinking  discomfort — partly,  I  confess,  be- 
cause to  this  day  I  don't  believe  there  is  any- 
thing the  matter  with  it.  In  any  case  it  is  the 
sheer  delight  of  construction  that  fascinates 
him,  and  everything  that  is  associated 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  35 

with  construction  fascinates  him.  He  is 
in  love  with  steel;  he  speaks  with  a  kind 
of  ecstasy  somewhere  of  "light  and  clean 
and  shimmering  shapes  of  silvered  steel";  steel 
and  iron  have  for  him  the  transcendental  charm 
that  harebells  and  primroses  had  for  Words- 
worth. A  world  like  that  in  The  Sleeper 
Awakes — a  world  of  gigantic  machines,  air 
fleets,  and  the  "swimming  shadows  and  enor- 
mous shapes"  of  an  engineer's  nightmare — 
is  only  by  afterthought,  one  feels,  the  specula- 
tion of  a  sociologist.  It  expresses  the  primi- 
tive relish  of  a  constructive  instinct.  It  ex- 
presses also  a  sheer  curiosity  about  the  future. 
In  a  chapter  of  his  book  on  America  Wells 
has  traced  the  development  of  what  he  calls  his 
prophetic  habit  of  mind  as  a  passage  through 
four  stages:  the  millennial  stage  of  an  evan- 
gelical childhood  when  an  imminent  Battle  of 
Armageddon  was  a  natural  thing  to  be  looked 
for;  the  stage  of  ultimate  biological  possibili- 
ties; the  stage  of  prediction  by  the  rule-of- 
three ;  and  a  final  stage  of  cautious  anticipation 
based  upon  the  study  of  existing  facts — a 
gradual  passage  from  the  region  of  religious  or 


36    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

scientific  possibilities  to  the  region  of  human 
probabilities.  "There  is  no  Being  but  Becom- 
ing" was  the  first  of  his  mental  discoveries; 
and  finding  years  later  that  Heraclitus  had  said 
the  same  thing,  he  came  to  regard  the  pre- Aris- 
totelian metaphysics  as  the  right  point  of  de- 
parture for  modern  thought.  Consider  this 
passage: 

I  am  curiously  not  interested  in  things  and  curi- 
ously interested  in  the  consequences  of  things.  .  .  . 
I  have  come  to  be,  I  am  afraid,  even  a  little  insensi- 
tive to  fine  immediate  things  through  this  anticipatory 
habit.  .  .  .  This  habit  of  mind  confronts  and  per- 
plexes my  sense  of  things  that  simply  are,  with  my 
brooding  preoccupation  with  how  they  will  shape  pres- 
ently, what  they  will  lead  to,  what  seed  they  will  sow 
and  how  they  will  wear.  At  times,  I  can  assure  the 
reader,  this  quality  approaches  other-worldliness  in  its 
constant  reference  to  an  all-important  hereafter.  There 
are  times  indeed  when  it  makes  life  seem  so  transparent 
and  flimsy,  seem  so  dissolving,  so  passing  on  to  an 
equally  transitory  series  of  consequences,  that  the  en- 
hanced sense  of  instability  becomes  restlessness  and 
distress;  but  on  the  other  hand  nothing  that  exists, 
nothing  whatever,  remains  altogether  vulgar  or  dull  and 
dead  or  hopeless  in  its  light.  .  .  .  But  the  interest 
is  shifted.  The  pomp  and  splendor  of  established  order, 
the  braying  triumphs,  ceremonies,  consummations, — one 
sees  these  glittering  shows  for  what  they  are — through 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  37 

their   threadbare   grandeur   shine   the   little   significant 
things  that  will  make  the  future. 

And  the  burden  of  his  lecture  The  Discovery 
of  the  Future  is  that  an  inductive  knowledge  of 
the  future  is  not  only  very  largely  possible,  but 
is  considerably  more  important  for  us  than  the 
study  of  the  past.  Even  in  the  sciences,  he 
says,  the  test  of  their  validity  is  their  power  to 
produce  confident  forecasts.  Astronomy  is 
based  on  the  forecast  of  stellar  movements, 
medical  science  exists  largely  for  diagnosis.  It 
is  this  thought  which  determines  the  nature  of 
his  own  sociology. 

There  is  usually  something  inept  in  speaking 
of  a  man,  and  especially  an  artist,  as  inter- 
changeable with  any  ism.  Socialism,  in  the 
common  sense  of  the  word,  is  a  classification  of 
men.  Individual  socialists  are  as  a  rule  some- 
thing more  than  socialists;  often  they  are  so- 
cialists by  necessity,  or  imagination,  or  senti- 
ment, or  expediency — their  socialism  is  not  in- 
herent, not  the  frame  of  their  whole  being.  In 
the  degree  that  socialism  is  a  classification,  or  a 
school  of  thought,  or  an  economic  theory,  the 
individual  socialist  will,  in  practice,  make  men- 


38     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

tal  reservations  from  it.  Now  my  whole  aim 
in  this  chapter  has  been  to  suggest  that  if  so- 
cialism had  not  existed  Wells  would  have  in- 
vented it.  It  is  not  something  which  at  a  given 
moment  or  even  after  a  long  process  of  imagi- 
native conversion  or  conviction  came  into  his 
life.  It  is,  in  his  own  formulation  of  it,  the 
projection  of  his  whole  nature,  the  expression 
of  his  will,  the  very  content  of  his  art.  With 
one  or  two  exceptions — works  deliberately  de- 
voted to  propaganda  or  exposition — even  his 
purely  sociological  writings  are  subjective 
writings,  personal  and  artistic  in  motive;  so- 
cialism figures  in  them  just  as  Catholicism  fig- 
ures in  the  masses  of  Mozart,  or  the  brother- 
hood of  man  in  the  poems  of  Whitman,  not  as 
a  cause  but  as  a  satisfying  conception  of  truth. 
And  just  as,  if  one  were  to  study  the  psychol- 
ogy of  Mozart  or  Whitman,  one  would  find 
habits  of  mind  that  inevitably  produced  the  in- 
dividual Catholicism  of  the  one  and  the  indi- 
vidual fraternalism  of  the  other;  so  behind  the 
socialism  of  Wells  are  certain  habits  of  mind, 
certain  primitive  likes,  relishes,  instincts,  pref- 
erences :  a  faith  in  free  will,  a  sense  of  order  and 


THE  FIRST  PHASE  39 

the  subordination  of  details  to  design,  a  per- 
sonal detachment,  a  pleasure  in  construction,  a 
curiosity  about  the  future. 

These  are  innate  qualities,  which  inevitably 
produced  their  own  animating  purpose. 


CHAPTER   II 

TOWARDS  SOCIALISM 

OF  all  the  battered,  blurred,  ambiguous 
coins  of  speech  there  is  none  so  battered, 
blurred,  and  ambiguous  as  the  word  socialism. 
It  mothers  a  dozen  creeds  at  war  with  one  an- 
other. And  the  common  enemy  looks  on,  for- 
tified with  the  Socratic  irony  of  the  "plain 
man,"  who  believes  he  has  at  last  a  full  excuse 
for  not  understanding  these  devious  doings. 

Therefore  I  take  refuge  in  saying  that  H. 
G.  Wells  is  an  artist,  neither  more  nor  less, 
that  socialism  is  to  him  at  bottom  an  artistic 
idea,  and  that  if  it  had  not  existed  in  the  world 
he  would  have  invented  it.  This  clears  me  at 
once  of  the  accusing  frowns  of  any  possible 
Marxian  reader,  and  it  also  states  a  truth  at  the 
outset.  For  if  the  orthodox  maintain  that  so- 
cialism is  not  an  affair  of  choices,  may  I  not  re- 
tort that  here  actually  is  a  mind  that  chooses  to 
make  it  so?  Here  is  an  extraordinary  kind  of 

40 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          41 

Utopian  who  has  all  the  equipment  of  the  or- 
thodox and  yet  remains  detached  from  ortho- 
doxy. Orthodoxy  is  always  jealous  of  its  tab- 
ernacles and  will  not  see  itself  dramatically; 
it  has  no  concern  with  artistic  presentations. 
But  I  protest  there  ought  to  be  no  quarrel 
here.  If  a  socialism  fundamentally  artistic  is 
an  offence  to  the  orthodox,  let  them  accept  it, 
without  resentment,  as  a  little  harmless  fun — 
all  art  being  that. 

Having  said  so  much  I  return  to  my  own 
difficulty,  for  it  is  very  hard  to  focus  H.  G. 
Wells.  He  has  passed  through  many  stages 
and  has  not  yet  attained  the  Olympian  repose. 
Artist  as  he  is,  he  has  been  hotly  entangled  in 
practical  affairs.  There  are  signs  in  his  early 
books  that  he  once  shared  what  Richard  Jef- 
fries called  the  "dynamite  disposition," — even 
now  he  knows,  in  imagination  alone,  the  joy 
of  black  destruction.  He  has  also  been,  and 
ceased  to  be,  a  Fabian.  But  it  is  plain  that 
he  has  passed  for  good  and  all  beyond  the 
emotional  plane  of  propaganda.  He  has 
abandoned  working-theories  and  the  decep- 
tions of  the  intellect  which  make  the  man  of 


42     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

action.  He  has  become  at  once  more  practical 
and  more  mystical  than  a  party  programme 
permits  one  to  be.  Here  is  a  world  where 
things  are  being  done — a  world  of  which  cap- 
ital and  labor  are  but  one  interpretation.  How 
far  can  these  things  and  the  men  who  do  them 
be  swept  into  the  service  of  the  race?  That  is 
the  practical  issue  in  his  mind,  and  the  mystical 
issue  lies  in  the  intensity  and  quality  of  the 
way  in  which  he  feels  it. 

To  see  him  clearly  one  has  to  remember  that 
he  is  not  a  synthetic  thinker  but  a  sceptical  ar- 
tist, whose  writings  are  subjective  even  when 
they  seem  to  be  the  opposite,  whose  personality 
is  constantly  growing,  expanding,  changing, 
correcting  itself  ("one  can  lie  awake  at  night 
and  hear  him  grow,"  as  Chesterton  says),  and 
who  believes  moreover  that  truth  is  not  an 
absolute  thing  but  a  consensus  of  conflicting 
individual  experiences,  a  "common  reason"  to 
be  wrought  out  by  constant  free  discussion 
and  the  comparison  and  interchange  of  per- 
sonal discoveries  and  ideas.  He  is  not  a  so- 
ciologist, but,  so  to  say,  an  artist  of  society; 
one  of  those  thinkers  who  are  disturbed  by 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          43 

the  absence  of  right  composition  in  human 
things,  by  incompetent  draughtsmanship  and 
the  misuse  of  colors,  who  see  the  various 
races  of  men  as  pigments  capable  of  har- 
monious blending  and  the  planet  itself  as  a 
potential  work  of  art  which  has  been  daubed 
and  distorted  by  ill-trained  apprentices.  In 
Wells  this  planetary  imagination  forms  a  per- 
manent and  consistent  mood,  but  it  has  the  con- 
sistency of  a  mood  and  not  the  consistency  of  a 
system  of  ideas.  And  though  he  springs  from 
socialism  and  leads  to  socialism,  he  can  only 
be  called  a  socialist  in  the  fashion — to  adopt  a 
violently  disparate  comparison — that  St.  Fran- 
cis can  be  called  a  Christian.  That  is  to  say, 
no  vivid,  fluctuating  human  being,  no  man  of 
genius  can  ever  be  embodied  in  an  institution. 
He  thinks  and  feels  it  afresh;  his  luminous, 
contradictory,  shifting,  evanescent  impulses 
may,  on  the  whole,  ally  him  with  this  or  that 
aggregate  social  view,  but  they  will  not  let  him 
be  subdued  to  it.  As  a  living,  expanding  or- 
ganism he  will  constantly  urge  the  fixed  idea 
to  the  limit  of  fluidity.  So  it  is  with  Wells. 
There  are  times  when  he  seems  as  whimsical 


44     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

as  the  wind  and  as  impossible  to  photograph 
as  a  chameleon. 

Just  here  I  should  like  to  give  what  may  be 
taken  as  his  own  view  of  capital  and  labor  so- 
cialism in  relation  to  the  constructive  socialism 
he  himself  has  at  heart.  I  am  putting  together 
certain  brief  passages  from  The  Passionate 
Friends: 

I  have  come  to  believe  now  that  labor  problems  are 
problems  only  by  the  way.  They  have  played  their  part 
in  a  greater  scheme.  .  .  .  With  my  innate  passionate 
desire  to  find  the  whole  world  purposeful,  I  cannot  but 
believe  that.  .  .  .  Strangest  of  saviours,  there  rises 
over  the  conflicts  of  men  the  glittering  angular  promise 
of  the  machine.  There  is  no  longer  any  need  for  slav- 
ery, open  or  disguised.  We  do  not  need  slaves  nor  toil- 
ers nor  mere  laborers  any  more;  they  are  no  longer 
essential  to  a  civilization.  Man  has  ridden  on  his 
brother  man  out  of  the  need  of  servitude.  He  struggles 
through  to  a  new  phase,  a  phase  of  release,  a  phase 
when  leisure  and  an  unexampled  freedom  are  possible  to 
every  human  being.  .  .  . 

Human  thought  has  begun  to  free  itself  from  indi- 
vidual entanglements  and  dramatic  necessities  and  acci- 
dental standards.  It  becomes  a  collective  mind,  a  col- 
lective will  towards  achievement,  greater  than  individ- 
uals or  cities  or  kingdoms  or  peoples,  a  mind  and  will  to 
which  we  all  contribute  and  which  none  of  us  may  com- 
mand nor  compromise  by  our  private  errors.  It  ceases 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          45 

to  be  aristocratic;  it  detaches  itself  from  persons  and 
takes  possession  of  us  all.  We  are  involved  as  it  grows 
free  and  dominant,  we  find  ourselves  in  spite  of  our- 
selves, in  spite  of  quarrels  and  jealousies  and  conflicts, 
helping  and  serving  in  the  making  of  a  new  world-city,  a 
new  greater  State  above  our  legal  States,  in  which  all 
human  life  becomes  a  splendid  enterprise,  free  and 
beautiful.  .  .  . 

I  have  long  since  ceased  to  trouble  about  the  econom- 
ics of  human  society.  Ours  are  not  economic  but  psy- 
chological difficulties.  .  .  . 

These  last  two  sentences  really  tell  the  whole 
story.  To  pass  from  economics  to  psychology 
is  to  pass  from  Man  to  men,  from  society  as  a 
direct  object  of  attack  to  the  individuals  who 
compose  it.  And  this  marks  the  evolution  of 
Wells  the  romancer  and  Wells  the  expositor  of 
socialist  doctrine  into  Wells  the  novelist.  It  is 
the  problems  of  human  interaction  that  occupy 
him  now.  But  informing  these  problems, 
reaching  behind  and  embracing  them,  is  a  gen- 
eral view  of  the  world  which  has  only  become 
more  intimate,  more  personal,  and  more  con- 
crete with  time. 

When,  in  New  Worlds  for  Old,  Wells  set 
himself  to  explain  socialism  as  he  conceived  it, 


46     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

he  assumed  as  his  first  principle  a  certain  Good 
Will  in  men,  an  operating  will  steadily  work- 
ing in  life  toward  betterment.  In  other  words, 
he  supplemented  the  ordinary  socialist  idea  of 
economic  determinism,  which  may  or  may  not 
inevitably  bring  about  order  on  the  industrial 
plane,  with  a  constructive  purpose,  which,  in' 
his  view,  can  alone  bring  about  the  salvation  of 
the  race.  But  this  Good  Will  is  not  a  fatality; 
it  exists  only  by  virtue  of  remaining  a  con- 
scious effort.  In  his  experiments  in  Time  and 
Space  Wells  had  accustomed  himself  to  seeing 
that  the  immense  possibilities  of  what  might 
be,  so  far  as  the  universe  is  concerned,  prede- 
termined things,  were,  so  far  as  man  is  con- 
cerned, matters  of  chance.  To  human  society 
at  least,  if  not  to  our  planet,  the  most  unpro- 
pitious  things  are  possible  in  the  future;  and 
there  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  destiny 
of  the  universe,  which  at  every  turn  cuts 
athwart  the  destiny  of  every  species  contained 
in  it,  should,  left  to  itself,  work  favorably  to 
man. 

This  notion  is  in  itself  quite  outside  socialism 
and  does  not  necessarily  lead  into  socialism.  It 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          47 

was  Huxley  who  said  that  the  world  and  the 
universe,  society  and  nature,  are  demonstrably 
at  cross  purposes,  and  that  man  has  to  pit  his 
microcosm  against  the  macrocosm.  Huxley, 
in  his  famous  lecture  on  Ethics  and  Evolution, 
went  on  from  this  to  a  kind  of  informal  and 
unavowed  socialism,  figuring  society  as  a  well- 
tended  garden  preserved  by  man's  careful  art 
from  the  ravages  and  invasions  of  that  hostile 
world  of  chance,  with  its  gigantic  weeds  and 
blind  impulsions,  which  everywhere  lies  wait- 
ing round  about  it.  Our  work,  he  implied, 
must  be  in  every  way  to  minimize  for  our- 
selves the  elements  of  chance,  to  become  aware 
of  our  species  in  a  collective  sense,  battling  with 
nature  and  moulding  our  own  future. 

I  do  not  suppose  that  Wells  consciously 
adopted  this  idea  from  Huxley.  In  itself  that 
would  be  of  little  consequence,  except  so  far 
as  it  shows  the  continuity  of  thought  and  the 
development  of  socialism  out  of  science.  But 
Wells  was  for  several  years  a  pupil  of  Hux- 
ley, and  it  is  reasonably  plain  that  the  mood 
in  which  he  wrote  his  scientific  romances  was 
strongly  impregnated  by  Huxley's  influence. 


48     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

The  sinister,  incalculable,  capricious,  destruc- 
tive forces  outside  man  are  symbolized,  as  I 
have  said,  by  those  colliding  comets,  invading 
Martians,  and  monstrous  creatures  among 
which  the  earlier  Wells  moved  and  had  his  be- 
ing; just  as  the  sinister,  incalculable,  capri- 
cious forces  within  man  which  urge  him  to 
destruction  form  so  great  a  part  of  his  later 
novels.  Most  of  his  heroes  (typified  in  The 
New  Machiavelli)  come  to  grief  through  the 
blind  irrational  impulsions  within  themselves. 
And  he  is  equally  haunted  by  what  he  has 
called  the  "Possible  Collapse  of  Civilization." 
I  do  not  know  how  much  this  is  due  to  an 
evangelical  childhood,  in  which  Time,  Death, 
and  Judgment  are  always  imminent;  how 
much  to  an  overbalancing  study  of  science  at 
the  expense  of  the  humanities ;  how  much  to  an 
overdeveloped  sense  of  the  hazard  that  life  is ; 
and  how  much  to  plain  facts.  But  there  it  is : 
it  has  always  been  a  fixed  conviction  with 
Wells  that  man  personal  and  man  social  is 
dancing  on  a  volcano. 

Therefore  he  has  come  to  socialism  not  by 
the  ordinary  course  but  by  a  route  obscure  and 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          49 

lonely.  The  sense  of  possible  catastrophe  and 
collapse,  the  folly  of  leaving  things  to  chance, 
the  infinite  waste  and  peril  of  committing  our 
affairs  to  nature  rather  than  to  art — these  are 
some  of  the  negative  reasons  that  have  made 
it  impossible  for  him  to  fall  in  with  the  non- 
socialist  ideal  in  human  affairs,  that  "broaden- 
ing down  from  precedent  to  precedent"  which 
he  calls  "mudd  ing  through":  a  doctrine  that  is 
wholly  comp?  Jble  with  a  world  of  haphazard 
motives,  accidental  fortunes,  accidental  man- 
agement, a  democratic  individualism  that 
places  power  in  irresponsible  hands  and  sup- 
presses talents  that  society  cannot  afford  to 
lose,  a  governmental  system  that  concerns  it- 
self with  legal  and  financial  arrangements, 
experts  with  no  sense  of  a  common  purpose, 
patriotisms  that  thrive  on  international  bad 
feelings,  and  that  competitive  principle  which 
succeeds  in  the  degree  in  which  it  ignores  the 
general  welfare — a  chaos  of  private  aims, 
private  virtues,  private  motives,  without  any 
collective  human  design  at  all. 

In  the  light  of  these  opposed  ideas  of  society 
as  a  thing  of  Chance  and  as  a  thing  of  Design, 


50     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

let  me  run  over  two  or  three  of  the  tales  of 
Wells. 

First  of  all  there  is  the  special  laissez  faire 
of  pure  economic  determinism.  The  Time 
Machine  pictures  a  possible  result  of  the 
Marxian  process  which  has  led  to  an  irrevo- 
cable division  of  classes.  The  rich,  who  were,  in 
the  old  time,  in  comparison  with  the  poor,  dis- 
ciplined and  united,  have  long  since  reached  a 
point  where  work  and  fear  are  for  them  things 
of  the  past.  They  occupy  the  surface  of  the 
earth,  and  idleness  and  futility  have  made  them 
light-headed,  puny,  helpless  creatures,  stirring 
about  and  amusing  themselves  in  the  sunlight. 
The  poor,  meanwhile,  driven  underground 
where  they  burrow  and  tend  machinery  and 
provide,  have  lost  all  human  semblance  and 
become  white,  horrible  ghoul-like  creatures 
that  see  in  the  dark;  at  night  they  swarm  out 
of  their  holes  and  feed  upon  the  creatures  of 
the  upper  air.  The  one  class  has  lost  all  power 
to  defend  itself  and  the  other  all  pity  to  spare, 
and  gradually,  year  after  year,  mankind  comes 
to  its  end. 

Then  there  is  the  ordinary  laissez  faire  of 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          51 

capitalism,  a  result  of  which  is  pictured  in  The 
Sleeper  Awakes.  The  Sleeper,  one  recalls, 
awakens  four  generations  hence  to  find  him- 
self the  master-capitalist,  owner  of  half  the 
world,  and  the  world  is  one  where  capital  and 
labor  have  irrevocably  destroyed  the  possibil- 
ity of  a  constructive  human  scheme.  But  the 
responsibility  for  that  future  is  very  ingen- 
iously placed  upon  us  of  the  present  time; 
for  Graham's  ownership  of  the  world  is  the 
outcome  of  one  of  those  irresponsible  whims 
that  in  our  day  characterize  the  whole  indi- 
vidualistic view  of  property.  His  cousin, 
having  no  family  to  inherit  his  possessions, 
has  left  the  whole  in  trust  for  the  Sleeper, 
half  in  jest,  expecting  him  never  to  waken; 
and  in  time  the  trustees  of  this  vested  fund 
have  become  the  irresponsible  bureaucrats  of 
the  world.  "We  were  making  the  future," 
says  the  awakened  Sleeper,  looking  out  upon 
this  monstrous  outcome  of  whim  and  laissez 
faire,  "and  hardly  any  of  us  troubled  to  think 
what  future  we  were  making." 

Consider  also  The  Empire  of  the  Ants,  in 
which  Wells  has  figured  a  possible  reconquest 


52     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

of  man  by  nature,  owing  to  the  greater  col- 
lective discipline  of  at  least  one  non-human 
species.  He  imagines  a  species  of  poisonous 
ants  with  only  a  little  greater  faculty  of  or- 
ganized co-operative  intelligence  than  ordi- 
nary ants,  which  have  terrorized  and  finally 
routed  several  villages  of  unintelligent  and  un- 
organized Brazilian  natives  far  up  the  Ama- 
zon. The  Brazilian  government  sends  against 
them  an  outworn  inefficient  gunboat,  with  an 
incompetent  captain  and  a  muddle-headed 
crew;  and  when  they  arrive  the  ants  fall  upon 
the  only  man  sent  ashore  and  sting  him  to 
death.  The  captain  repeats  over  and  over, 
"But  what  can  we  do?"  And  at  last  with  tre- 
mendous decision  he  fires  a  gun  at  them  and 
retires.  The  story  ends  with  a  report  that  the 
ants  are  swarming  all  over  the  interior  of 
Brazil  and  that  nobody  knows  how  to  prevent 
them  from  occupying  the  whole  of  South 
America. 

And  then  there  is  The  History  of  Mr.  Polly. 
I  ignore  for  the  moment  the  individual  aspect 
of  his  case,  for  Mr.  Polly  is  not  merely  an  in- 
dividual— he  is  an  emblem  of  the  whole,  he  is 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          53 

society  in  concrete.  We  find  him  at  the  open- 
ing of  the  book  sitting  on  a  stile,  suffering 
from  indigestion  and  consequently  depressed 
in  spirits.  It  is  two  o'clock  of  a  Sunday  after- 
noon, and  he  has  just  finished  his  mid-day 
meal.  He  has  eaten  cold  potatoes,  cold  pork, 
Rashdall's  mixed  pickles — three  gherkins,  two 
onions,  a  small  cauliflower  head  and  several 
capers;  cold  suet  pudding,  treacle  and  pale 
cheese,  three  slices  of  grey  bread,  and  a  jug  of 
beer.  He  hates  himself,  he  hates  his  wife,  he 
hates  existence.  But  Mr.  Polly's  interior,  the 
things  that  have  gone  into  it  and  the  emotions 
that  rise  out  of  it,  are  only  typical  of  an  entire 
life  that  has,  to  quote  Macaulay's  eulogy  of  the 
British  constitution,  thought  nothing  of  sym- 
metry and  much  of  convenience. 

Each  of  the  novels  of  Wells,  in  one  aspect 
at  least,  presents  the  accidental  nature  of  our 
world  in  some  one  typical  case.  Love  and  Mr. 
Lewisham  shows  how  in  the  case  of  one  of 
those  young  students  who  have,  as  things  are, 
no  chance  at  all,  but  who  are  the  natural  build- 
ers of  a  better  world,  the  constructive  possibil- 
ity is  crushed  by  the  primary  will  to  live.  At 


54     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

eighteen  Mr.  Lewisham  is  an  assistant  master 
at  one  of  those  incompetent  private-enterprise 
schools  which  for  Wells  (as  also  for  Matthew 
Arnold)  epitomize  our  haphazard  civilization. 
He  has  a  "future" — the  Schema  which  he  pins 
to  his  bedroom  wall  promises  unimaginable 
achievements.  He  marries,  and  you  feel  that 
he  should  marry  and  that  he  has  married  the 
right  person.  But  then  with  interests  divided 
he  has  to  find  money  and  in  doing  so  he  fails 
in  his  examinations.  At  last  it  becomes  a 
choice  between  his  career  and  his  children,  be- 
tween the  present  and  the  future,  and  the  chil- 
dren and  the  future  win.  Society  loses  just  in 
the  degree  that  Lewisham  himself  loses,  for  he 
was  fitted  to  be  a  builder ;  and  society  has  first, 
in  the  face  of  all  his  efforts,  imperfectly 
equipped  him  and  then  consistently  refused  to 
take  advantage  of  his  talents. 

Just  as  Lewisham  is  a  potential  builder 
of  society  who  is  defeated,  so  Kipps  is  a  speci- 
men of  the  raw  material,  the  muddled  inferior 
material  with  which  society  has  to  deal  and  re- 
fuses to  deal.  Kipps,  like  Mr.  Polly,  is  from 
the  beginning  a  victim  of  accident,  spawned  on 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          55 

the  world,  miseducated,  apprenticed  at  four- 
teen to  a  Drapery  Bazaar.  He  grows  up  ig- 
norant, confused,  irresponsible;  and  then  sud- 
denly, as  accidentally  as  he  was  born,  has 
£26,000  and  responsibility  thrust  upon  him. 
The  fortune  of  Kipps  lifts  him  at  once  out  of 
the  obscure  negligible  world  of  the  populace 
and  makes  him  a  figure  to  be  reckoned  with. 
Therein  lies  the  comedy  of  the  book.  He 
tries  to  make  himself  what  in  his  own  view  a 
man  of  means  ought  to  be;  naturally  he  sees 
money  not  as  a  force  but  as  a  thing  to  be 
spent,  and  he  finds  that  even  from  this  point  of 
view  he  has  no  freedom  of  will,  and  that  his 
lack  of  training  inevitably  places  him  in  the 
hands  of  equally  irresponsible  persons  who 
want  his  money.  He  wishes  to  build  a  house, 
designed  after  his  own  vaguely  apprehended 
needs  and  desires,  and  somehow  under  the 
wand  of  the  architect  a  house  with  eleven  bed- 
rooms springs  from  the  ground,  a  house  plain- 
ly far  beyond  his  own  or  Ann's  power  of 
management,  and  the  prospect  of  disrespect- 
ful servants,  terrifying  callers,  and  a  horde  of 
scheming  lawyers,  tradesfolk  and  satellites. 


56     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

And  the  life  of  Kipps  under  prosperity  is 
summed  up  in  the  following  dialogue : 

"Wonder  what  I  shall  do  this  afternoon,"  said  Kipps, 
with  his  hands  deep  in  his  pockets. 

He  pondered  and  lit  a  cigarette. 

"Go  for  a  walk,  I  s'pose,"  said  Ann. 

"I  been  for  a  walk  this  morning." 

"S'pose  I  must  go  for  another,"  he  added  after  an 
interval. 

May  one  suggest  how  the  significance  of 
such  a  story  as  this  varies  according  to  the  point 
of  view?  In  the  ordinary  literature  of  comedy, 
Kipps  would  be  merely  a  parvenu  whose  want 
of  dignity  and  ignorance  of  the  right  use  of 
money  are  laughable — or,  if  the  novelist  were 
a  humanitarian,  pitiful.  To  the  socialist,  on  the 
other  hand,  every  incident  of  his  life,  every 
gesture  of  his  mind,  is  a  unique  indictment  of 
things  as  they  are.  He  stands  for  the  whole 
waste  of  human  stuff  in  a  world  which  has  not 
learned  how  to  economize  itself,  whose  every 
detail  is  accidental  in  a  general  chaotic  ab- 
sence of  social  design. 

In  this  aspect  Tono-Bungay  is  the  most 
powerful  work  of  Wells.  Just  as  his  romances 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          57 

of  the  future  had  exhibited  the  possible  effects 
of  accidental  heedless  social  conduct  in  the 
past,  so  his  novels  exhibit  the  motives  that  pro- 
duce this  heedlessness  to  consequences.  Thus 
the  world  in  which  the  Sleeper  awakes,  a  world 
irrevocably  ruled  by  the  bureaucratic  trustees 
of  an  irresponsible  private  fortune,  is  just  a 
conceivable  consequence  of  such  a  career  as 
Uncle  Ponderevo's,  had  not  catastrophe  over- 
whelmed him  and  enabled  Wells  to  point  a 
much  more  pregnant  moral.  Tono-Bungay  is 
a  great  epic  of  irresponsible  capitalism  from 
the  socialist  point  of  view.  Uncle  Ponderevo 
is  a  born  commercial  meteor,  and  when  he  first 
enters  the  book,  a  small  druggist  in  a  dead 
country  town,  he  exhibits  the  temperament  of 
a  Napoleon  of  finance  spoiling  for  conquest. 
He  wants  to  Wake  Up  Wimblehurst,  invent 
something,  do  something,  shove  something. 

He  indicated  London  as  remotely  over  the  top  of  the 
dispensing  counter,  and  then  as  a  scene  of  great  activity 
by  a  whirl  of  the  hand  and  a  wink  and  a  meaning  smile 
at  me. 

"What  sort  of  things  do  they  do?"  I  asked. 

"Rush    about/'    he    said.     "Do    things!     Somethin' 


58     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

glorious.  There's  cover  gambling.  Ever  heard  of  that, 
George?"  He  drew  the  air  in  through  his  teeth.  "You 
put  down  a  hundred,  say,  and  buy  ten  thousand  pounds' 
worth.  See?  That's  a  cover  of  one  per  cent.  Things 
go  up  one,  you  sell,  realize  cent  per  cent;  down,  whiff, 
it's  gone!  Try  again!  Cent  per  cent,  George,  every 
day.  Men  are  made  or  done  for  in  an  hour.  And  the 
shoutin'!  .  .  .  Well,  that's  one  way,  George.  Then 
another  way — there's  Corners!" 

"They're  rather  big  things,  aren't  they?"  I  ventured. 

"Oh,  if  you  go  in  for  wheat  and  steel — yes.  But 
suppose  you  tackled  a  little  thing,  George.  Just  some 
leetle  thing  that  only  needed  a  few  thousands.  Drugs, 
for  example.  Shoved  all  you  had  into  it — staked  your 
liver  on  it,  so  to  speak.  Take  a  drug — take  ipecac,  for 
example.  Take  a  lot  of  ipecac.  Take  all  there  is !  See  ? 
There  you  are!  There  aren't  unlimited  supplies  of  ipe- 
cacuanha— can't  be ! — and  it's  a  thing  people  must  have. 
Then  quinine  again!  You  watch  your  chance,  wait  for 
a  tropical  war  breaking  out,  let's  say,  and  collar  all  the 
quinine.  Where  are  they?  Must  have  quinine,  you 
know — Eh?  .  .  . 

"Lord!  there's  no  end  of  things — no  end  of  little 
things.  Dill-water — all  the  suff'ring  babes  yowling  for 
it.  Eucalyptus  again — cascara — witch  hazel — menthol 
— all  the  toothache  things.  Then  there's  antiseptics,  and 
curare,  cocaine.  .  .  . 

"Rather  a  nuisance  to  the  doctors,"  I  reflected. 

"They  got  to  look  out  for  themselves.  By  Jove,  yes. 
They'll  do  you  if  they  can,  and  you  do  them.  Like 


TOWARDS  SOCIALISM          59 

brigands.  That  makes  it  romantic.  That's  the  Romance 
of  Commerce,  George." 

He  passed  into  a  rapt  dream,  from  which  escaped 
such  fragments  as:  "Fifty  per  cent,  advance,  sir;  se- 
curity— to-morrow." 

The  idea  of  cornering  a  drug  struck  upon  my  mind 
then  as  a  sort  of  irresponsible  monkey  trick  that  no  one 
would  ever  be  permitted  to  do  in  reality.  It  was  the 
sort  of  nonsense  one  would  talk  to  make  Ewart  laugh 
and  set  him  going  on  to  still  odder  possibilities.  I 
thought  it  was  part  of  my  uncle's  way  of  talking.  But 
I've  learnt  differently  since.  The  whole  trend  of  mod- 
ern money-making  is  to  foresee  something  that  will  prob- 
ably be  needed  and  put  it  out  of  reach,  and  then  to  hag- 
gle yourself  wealthy.  You  buy  up  land  upon  which 
people  will  presently  want  to  build  houses,  you  secure 
rights  that  will  bar  vitally  important  developments,  and 
so  on,  and  so  on.  Of  course  the  naive  intelligence  of  a 
boy  does  not  grasp  the  subtler  developments  of  human 
inadequacy.  He  begins  life  with  the  disposition  to  be- 
lieve in  the  wisdom  of  grown-up  people,  he  does  not 
realize  how  casual  and  disingenuous  has  been  the  devel- 
opment of  law  and  custom,  and  he  thinks  that  some- 
where in  the  state  there  is  a  power  as  irresistible  as  a 
head  master's  to  check  mischievous,  foolish  enterprises 
of  every  sort.  I  will  confess  that  when  my  uncle 
talked  of  cornering  quinine,  I  had  a  clear  impression 
that  any  one  who  contrived  to  do  that  would  pretty  cer- 
tainly go  to  gaol.  Now  I  know  that  any  one  who  could 
really  bring  it  off  would  be  much  more  likely  to  go  to 
the  House  of  Lords! 


60     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

And  such  or  nearly  such  is  this  career.  Tono- 
Bungay,  that  swindling  patent  medicine  with- 
out value  or  meaning,  is  the  insubstantial  hip- 
pogriff  upon  which  Uncle  Ponderevo  soars 
upward  on  the  wind  of  advertisement.  In  a 
society  whose  basis  is  unlimited  individual 
rights,  he  is  able  to  disorganize  the  industrial 
world  and  to  work  out  his  absurd,  inept,  ex- 
travagant destiny,  scattering  ruin  right  and 
left. 

But  the  spirit  of  Good  Will,  the  disinter- 
ested constructive  spirit  of  socialism  which  is 
the  underlying  assumption  of  Wells,  appears 
here  as  in  all  his  later  books.  Out  of  the 
wreckage  the  constructive  purpose  emerges,  in 
the  person  of  George  Ponderevo.  It  shapes 
itself  as  a  steel  destroyer,  the  work  of  an  en- 
gineer's brain,  a  destroyer  which  England  has 
refused  and  which  plunges  down  the  Thames 
to  the  open  sea,  the  symbol  of  man's  intentions, 
without  illusions  and  without  the  hope  of  per- 
sonal gain,  the  disinterested  spirit  of  science 
and  truth. 


CHAPTER   III 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE" 


IN  the  development  of  intellectual  modesty  lies  the 
growth  of  statesmanship.  It  has  been  the  chronic 
mistake  of  statecraft  and  all  organizing  spirits  to  at- 
tempt immediately  to  scheme  and  arrange  and  achieve. 
Priests,  schools  of  thought,  political  schemers,  leaders 
of  men,  have  always  slipped  into  the  error  of  assuming 
that  they  can  think  out  the  whole — or,  at  any  rate,  com- 
pletely think  out  definite  parts — of  the  purpose  and  fu- 
ture of  man,  clearly  and  finally;  they  have  set  them- 
selves to  legislate  and  construct  on  that  assumption,  and, 
experiencing  the  perplexing  obduracy  and  evasions  of 
reality,  they  have  taken  to  dogma,  persecution,  training; 
pruning,  secretive  education,  and  all  the  stupidities  of 
self-sufficient  energy. 

The  man  who  wrote  that  is  not  what  is  called 
a  whole-hearted  man  as  regards  any  form  of 
group-action.  He  does  not  "fit  in."  He  is  at 
bottom  a  sceptic,  and  a  sceptic  is  one  who  re- 
duces every  question  to  the  question  of  human 
nature.  So  that  the  socialism  of  Wells  is  nee- 

61 


62     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

essarily  at  variance  with  all  the  recognized 
group-forms  of  socialism,  Administrative, 
Philanthropic,  and  Revolutionary.  I  must 
briefly  indicate  in  each  case  what  is  the  quality 
of  this  divergence. 

As  regards  the  first,  he  has  a  complete  dis- 
trust of  what  Hilaire  Belloc  has  called  the 
"Servile  State;"  and  what  he  distrusts  he  viru- 
lently dislikes.  In  his  view,  Administrative 
socialism,  as  it  appears  in  Sidney  Webb  and 
the  Fabian  Society,  and  in  the  tendency  of 
contemporary  Liberalism,  has  led  to  an  exces- 
sive conservatism  toward  the  existing  machin- 
ery of  government,  it  has  depended  altogether 
too  much  on  organization  without  popular 
support,  and  as  a  result  has  tended  to  throw 
the  whole  force  of  the  socialist  movement  into 
a  bureaucratic  regime  of  small-minded  experts. 
The  activity  of  the  Fabians  especially,  he  says, 
has  set  great  numbers  of  socialists  working  in 
the  old  governmental  machinery  without  real- 
izing that  the  machinery  should  have  been  re- 
constructed first.  The  whole  tendency  of  this 
method,  as  it  is  exhibited  in  the  works  of  the 
English  Liberal  Party  of  to-day,  is  toward 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  63 

a  socialization  of  the  poor  without  a  corre- 
sponding socialization  of  the  rich;  toward  a 
more  and  more  marked  chasm  between  the  reg- 
imented workers  and  the  free  employers. 

And  it  throws  the  control  of  affairs  into  the 
hands  of  a  mass  of  highly  specialized  officials, 
technical  minds,  mutually-unenlightened  ex- 
perts. In  an  age  when  the  progress  of  so- 
ciety depends  upon  breaking  down  profession- 
al barriers,  when  the  genuine  scientist,  for  in- 
stance, is  a  man  who  passes  beyond  his  own 
science  and  sees  the  inter-relationships  of  all 
knowledge,  the  mind  which  has  been  trained  in 
one  habitual  routine  is  the  most  dangerous  type 
of  mind  to  place  in  authority.  On  the  one 
hand,  society  depends  upon  the  cooperation 
of  all  sorts  of  specialists,  their  free  discussion, 
and  comparison  of  methods,  results,  and  aims ; 
on  the  other  experts  in  office  are  apt  to  grow 
narrow,  impatient,  and  contemptuous,  seeing 
nothing  beyond  their  immediate  work, — and 
this  particularly  when  they  have  been  trained 
for  administration  without  any  wide  experi- 
ence of  the  world. 

Therefore  upon  experts  as  such,  in  distinc- 


64     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

tion  from  constructive  and  cooperating  spe- 
cialists, Wells,  with  all  the  force  of  his  belief 
in  the  ventilating  of  knowledge  and  the  hu- 
manizing of  affairs,  wages  an  unceasing  war. 
The  First  Men  in  the  Moon  satirizes,  after  the 
fashion  of  Swift,  a  world  where  the  expert 
view  of  life,  not  only  in  administration  hut  in 
all  work,  prevails.  Each  inhabitant  of  the 
Moon  has  a  single  rigidly  defined  function,  to 
which  everything  else  in  his  nature  is  accom- 
modated. Thus  certain  types  of  machine- 
menders  are  compressed  in  jars,  while  others 
are  dwarfed  to  fit  them  for  fine  work,  "a  really 
more  humane  proceeding,"  as  Mr.  Cavor  ob- 
serves, "than  our  method  of  leaving  children 
to  grow  into  human  beings  and  then  making 
machines  of  them."  And  in  The  Great  State 
he  returns  to  his  attack  on  government  by  ex- 
perts: "Whatever  else  may  be  worked  out  in 
the  subtler  answers  our  later  time  prepares, 
nothing  can  be  clearer  than  that  the  necessary 
machinery  of  government  must  be  elaborately 
organized  to  prevent  the  development  of  a 
managing  caste  in  permanent  conspiracy,  tacit 
or  expressed,  against  the  normal  man."  And 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  65 

he  adds:  "The  Great  State  will,  I  feel  con- 
vinced, regard  changes  in  occupation  as  a 
proper  circumstance  in  the  life  of  every  citizen; 
it  will  value  a  certain  amateurishness  in  its  ser- 
vice, and  prefer  it  to  the  trite  omniscience  of 
the  stale  official."  One  of  the  many  and  in- 
creasing indications,  one  might  suggest,  of  the 
remarkable  tendency  in  Wells  to  find  good  in 
the  old  humanistic  Tory,  as  distinguished  from 
the  modern  bureaucratic  Liberal,  view  of  life. 
But  lest  I  be  tempted  to  carry  this  latter 
suggestion  too  far  just  at  this  point,  I  pass  on 
to  his  equally  virulent  dislike  of  Philanthropic 
socialism  and  the  busy  Superior  Person  in  af- 
fairs; especially  the  type  of  political  woman 
so  dear  to  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's  heart.  If 
the  expert  bureaucratic  point  of  view  repre- 
sents the  action  of  socialist  thought  on  the  Lib- 
eral Progressive  mind,  so  also  the  philanthropic 
superior  point  of  view  represents  the  action  of 
socialist  thought  on  the  Conservative  mind.  It 
is  arrogant,  aggressive,  and  condescending.  It 
implies  the  raising  of  one's  inferiors,  and  what 
weak  mortal  should  assume  that  she  (for  this 
happens  to  be  a  mainly  feminine  affliction)  is 


66     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

the  standard  according  to  which  other  mortals 
ought  to  be  raised? 

Two  of  these  energetic  ladies  have  been  pic- 
tured with  a  bitter  vividness  by  Wells  in  Al- 
tiora  Bailey  and  Aunt  Plessington,  the  former 
summing  up  the  Fabian-expert  view,  the  lat- 
ter summing  up  the  Superior-philanthropic 
view.  Altiora  has  "P.  B.  P." — pro  bono  pub- 
lico — engraved  inside  her  wedding  ring.  All 
the  misery  of  the  world  she  marshals  invincibly 
in  statistics.  She  sees  everything  as  existing  in 
types  and  classes;  she  pushes  her  cause  with 
a  hard,  scheming,  and  wholly  self-centred  eag- 
erness, managing  political  dinners,  indefati- 
gably  compiling  blue-books,  dreaming  of  a 
world  nailed  as  tightly  and  firmly  under  the 
rule  of  experts  as  a  carpet  is  nailed  with  brass 
tacks. 

On  the  other  hand  Aunt  Plessington  is  the 
incarnation  of  a  "Movement"  somewhat  vague 
in  purpose  but  always  aggressively  beneficial 
to  the  helpless  ones  of  the  earth.  "Her  voice 
was  the  true  governing-class  voice,  a  strangu- 
lated contralto,  abundant  and  authoritative;  it 
made  everything  she  said  clear  and  important, 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  67 

so  that  if  she  said  it  was  a  fine  morning  it  was 
like  leaded  print  in  the  Times/'  Her  mission 
is  principally  to  interfere  with  the  habits  and 
tastes  of  the  working-class,  making  it  impos- 
sible for  them  to  buy  tobacco  and  beer  or  "the 
less  hygienic  and  more  palatable  forms  of 
bread  (which  do  not  sufficiently  stimulate  the 
coatings  of  the  stomach)."  She  is,  in  short, 
one  of  those  odious  managing  people  who 
know  nothing  of  and  care  nothing  for  human 
nature,  who  concern  themselves  wholly  with 
the  effects  without  penetrating  to  the  causes 
of  misery,  who  see  mankind  as  irrevocably  di- 
vided into  a  governing  and  a  governed  class, 
and  whose  idea  of  government  is  to  make  the 
governed  as  uncomfortably  efficient  as  possible 
and  as  lacking  in  free  will.  She  is  exactly  one 
of  those  arrogant  sterile  souls,  in  love  with 
methods  rather  than  men,  who  have  made  the 
Servile  State  an  imminent  and  horrid  possi- 
bility and  have  turned  so  many  misinformed 
human  beings  (including  Tolstoy)  against  so- 
cialism altogether. 

If  Wells  dislikes  Administrative  and  Phil- 
anthropic socialism  because  they  are  not  suffi- 


68     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

ciently  human,  he  has  an  equal  aversion  to  what 
is  called  orthodox,  that  is  to  say,  Revolutionary 
socialism;  and  in  this  he  includes  all  social- 
ism that  is  fundamentally  economic.  "I  have 
long  since  ceased  to  trouble  about  the  econom- 
ics of  human  society,"  says  Stratton  in  The 
Passionate  Friends >  in  words  we  are  justified 
in  taking  as  the  opinion  of  Wells  himself. 
"Ours  are  not  economic  but  psychological  dif- 
ficulties." 

That  statement  is  full  of  meaning.  It  ex- 
presses, not  a  fact  but  a  personal  conviction — 
the  personal  conviction  with  which  the  psycho- 
logical constructive  socialism  of  Wells  begins. 
But  before  I  pass  on  to  this  I  must  make  one 
comment  that  persists  in  my  mind. 

Nothing  is  more  remarkable  than  the  una- 
nimity with  which  during  the  last  few  years  the 
advanced  world  has  put  all  its  eggs  in  the 
basket  of  pragmatism,  the  basket  that  has  been 
so  alluringly  garnished  by  Bergson's  Creative 
Evolution.  In  this  movement  of  thought 
Wells  has  inevitably  become  one  of  the  lead- 
ers, and  his  practical  desertion  of  the  socialist 
cause  is  one  of  the  main  symptoms  of  it.  The 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  69 

creative  energies  of  men,  where  society  as  a 
whole  is  concerned,  are,  in  this  philosophy,  con- 
ceived as  bursting  through  the  husks  and  in- 
stitutions of  the  world,  not  consciously  de- 
stroying them  but  shedding  them  incidentally 
and  passing  on.  Now  as  regards  sociology 
there  is  an  obvious  fatalism  in  that;  for  the 
burden  of  proof  lies  once  more  on  a  personal 
basis,  on  a  personal  basis  qualified  by  the  ca- 
pacity of  the  person.  It  is  true  that  this  cre- 
ative and  constructive  tendency,  like  the  total 
tendency  of  modern  life,  is  in  the  direction  of 
socialism,  it  is  true  that  a  thousand  elements  in 
modern  life  which  could  never  be  engaged  in 
the  class-war  are  led  by  it  into  line  with  social- 
ism. Yet  there  capitalism  is !  Only  the  black- 
browed  Marxian  steadily  contemplates  the  fact 
that  year  by  year  the  rich  compound  their 
riches  and  the  poor  their  poverty,  while  those 
that  have  no  chance  of  creative  outlets  plant 
dynamite. 

I  do  not  mean  that  Wells  is  "wrong"  in 
abandoning  the  economic  for  the  psychological 
approach, — that  is  plainly  the  inevitable  course 
for  him.  I  wish  simply  to  mark  a  distinction. 


70     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

The  gospel  of  Wells  is  an  entirely  personal 
one;  it  frankly  concerns  itself  with  the  inner 
realities  of  the  human  mind,  and  in  that  lies 
its  great  importance.  But  let  us  discriminate. 
Like  every  purely  personal  doctrine  it  contains, 
in  relation  to  the  facts  and  causes  of  society, 
a  certain  quietism.  It  withdraws  the  mind  from 
corporate  action  and  lays  emphasis  on  corpo- 
rate thought.  But  it  recognizes  no  corporate 
enemy.  To  be  an  opponent  of  capitalism  as 
such,  is,  in  this  philosophy,  as  quaint  and  crude 
and  crusty  as  to  be  an  anti-suffragist  or  a 
believer  in  politics  (for  it  has  become  the 
fashion  to  believe  with  fervor  in  the  franchise 
and  scarcely  to  believe  at  all  in  what  the  fran- 
chise stands  for) . 

There  is  then  a  certain  danger  in  the  creative 
pragmatism  of  this  particular  time.  If  it  ac- 
tually does  penetrate  to  the  head  men  of  the 
world,  if  it  is  able  to  generate  what  I  suppose 
may  be  called  a  "moral  equivalent"  of  duty — 
and  there  is  almost  a  probability  that  it  will — 
the  hazard  is  won.  If  it  does  not — and  many 
keen  thinkers  and  men  of  action  are  obdurate 
— then  we  shall  simply  have  the  fait  accompli 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  71 

with  compound  interest.  What  if  it  should 
turn  out  in  the  end,  after  the  best  brains  of 
socialism  had  all  withdrawn  from  the  economic 
programme  of  socialism,  that  capitalism  grows 
all  the  greener  in  the  sunlight  of  their  tacit 
consent?  There  is  Congress,  there  is  Parlia- 
ment, and  there  they  propose  to  remain.  Sup- 
pose they  are  not  converted  from  the  top  ?  Is 
it  altogether  wise  to  stop  persecuting  them 
from  the  bottom? 

So  much  before  I  pass  on.  This  comment 
does  not  qualify  the  teaching  of  Wells.  It 
merely  supplements  it  from  the  economic  side, 
and  the  supplement  seems  to  me  an  important 
one. 

Of  a  piece  with  his  whole  point  of  view  is 
that  he  calls  the  right  sociological  method  not 
a  scientific  but  an  artistic  method:  it  consists 
of  the  making  and  comparing  of  Utopias.  This 
idea  he  sets  forth  in  his  paper  The  So-called 
Science  of  Sociology.  "What  is  called  the  sci- 
entific method,"  he  says,  "the  method  of  ob- 
servation, of  theory  about  these  observations, 
experiments  in  verification  of  that  theory  and 
confirmation  or  modification,  really  'comes  off' 


72     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

in  the  sciences  in  which  the  individuality  of  the 
units  can  be  pretty  completely  ignored."  The 
method  that  is  all-important  in  the  primary 
physical  sciences  where  the  individuality  of 
atoms  and  molecules  may  conveniently  be  ig- 
nored for  the  sake  of  practical  truth,  becomes 
in  his  view  proportionately  untrue  as  the  sci- 
ences in  their  gradation  approach  the  human 
world.  "We  cannot,"  he  says  in  First  and 
Last  Things j  "put  humanity  into  a  museum 
and  dry  it  for  examination;  our  one  still  liv- 
ing specimen  is  all  history,  all  anthropology, 
and  the  fluctuating  world  of  men.  There  is 
no  satisfactory  means  of  dividing  it  and 
nothing  in  the  real  world  with  which  to  com- 
pare it.  We  have  only  the  remotest  idea  of  its 
'life-cycle'  and  a  few  relics  of  its  origin  and 
dreams  of  its  destiny."  And  in  the  paper  I 
have  just  mentioned  he  speaks  of  the  Social 
Idea  as  a  thing  "struggling  to  exist  and  real- 
ize itself  in  a  world  of  egotisms,  animals,  and 
brute  matter.  .  .  .  Now  I  submit  it  is  not 
only  a  legitimate  form  of  approach,  but  alto- 
gether the  most  promising  and  hopeful  form 
of  approach,  to  endeavor  to  disentangle  and 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  73 

express  one's  personal  version  of  that  idea, 
and  to  measure  realities  from  the  standpoint 
of  that  realization.  I  think,  in  fact,  that  the 
creation  of  Utopias — and  their  exhaustive  crit- 
icism— is  the  proper  and  distinctive  method  of 
sociology."  This  notion  of  sociology  as  prop- 
erly artistic  in  method  and  diagnostic  in  aim 
indicates  his  main  divergence  from  the  meth- 
ods and  aims  of  Comte  and  Spencer. 

And  so  one  turns  to  his  own  illustration  of 
this  belief,  A  Modern  Utopia.  It  is  a  beauti- 
ful Utopia,  beautifully  seen  and  beautifully 
thought;  and  it  has  in  it  some  of  that  flavor 
of  airy  unrestraint  one  finds  in  News  from 
Nowhere.  Morris,  of  course,  carries  us  into 
a  world  where  right  discipline  has  long  since 
produced  right  will,  so  wholly  and  instinctively 
socialized  that  men  can  afford  to  be  as  free  as 
anarchists  would  have  the  unsocialized  men  of 
our  own  time,  a  world  such  as  Goethe  had  in 
mind  when  he  said:  "There  is  in  man  a  force, 
a  spring  of  goodness  which  counterbalances 
egoism;  and  if  by  a  miracle  it  could  for  a  mo- 
ment suddenly  be  active  in  all  men,  the  earth 
would  at  once  be  free  from  evil."  Well,  that 


74     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

is  the  miracle  which  has  in  some  way  just  taken 
place  before  the  curtain  goes  up  on  most  Uto- 
pias; and  I  think  that  Wells  has  never  been 
more  skilful  than  in  keeping  this  miracle 
quietly  in  his  bag  of  tricks  and  devising  mean- 
while a  plausible  transition  between  us  and  that 
better  world.  It  all  happens  in  a  moment  and 
we  are  there.  By  an  amazing  legerdemain  of 
logic  he  leaps  the  gap  and  presents  us  with  a 
planet  which  at  every  point  tallies  with  our 
own.  It  is  a  planet  which  does  not  contain  a 
State  but  is  a  State,  the  flexible  result  of  a 
free  social  gesture. 

Mankind  in  the  Making  should  be  taken  as 
introductory  to  A  Modern  Utopia.  It  is  the 
sketch  of  a  method  towards  attaining  such  a 
world  state.  It  is  a  kind  of  treatise  on  educa- 
tion based  on  the  assumption  that  "our  success 
or  failure  with  the  unending  stream  of  babies 
is  the  measure  of  our  civilization."  It  opens 
with  a  complete  repudiation  of  "scientific" 
breeding,  as  a  scheme  which  ignores  the  unique- 
ness of  individual  cases  and  the  heterogeneous 
nature  of  human  ideals.  "We  are,"  says 
Wells,  "not  a  bit  clear  what  points  to  breed 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  75 

for,  and  what  points  to  breed  out;"  while  the 
interplay  of  strong  and  varied  personalities 
we  desire  is  contradictory  to  any  uniform  no- 
tions of  beauty,  capacity,  and  sanity,  which 
thus  cannot  be  bred  for,  so  to  speak,  in  the  ab- 
stract. But  in  A  Modern  Utopia  he  outlines 
certain  conditions  limiting  parentage,  holding 
it  necessary  that  in  order  to  be  a  parent  a  man 
must  be  above  a  certain  minimum  of  capacity 
and  income,  failing  which  he  is  indebted  to  the 
State  for  the  keep  of  his  children.  Mother- 
hood is  endowed  and  becomes  in  this  way  a 
normal  and  remunerative  career,  which  renders 
the  mother  capable  of  giving  her  time  to  the 
care  and  education  of  her  children,  as  millions 
are  not  in  a  wage-earning  civilization,  and 
makes  both  her  and  her  children  independent 
of  the  ups  and  downs  of  her  husband.  His 
very  detailed  suggestions  about  the  education 
of  young  children  (illustrated  also  in  The  Food 
of  the  Gods)  are  at  once  a  reminiscence  of 
Rabelais  and  an  anticipation  of  Madame  Mon- 
tessori.  He  insists  upon  uniform  pronuncia- 
tion (a  very  important  matter  in  England, 
where  diversity  of  language  is  one  of  the  bul- 


76    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

warks  of  a  rigid  class-system),  the  universal- 
ity and  constant  revision  of  text-books,  the 
systematic  reorganization  of  public  library  and 
bookselling  methods,  with  a  view  to  making  the 
race  think  as  a  whole.  He  urges  the  necessity 
of  rescuing  literature  from  the  accidents  of 
the  book-market  by  endowing  critical  reviews, 
chairs  for  the  discussion  of  contemporary 
thought,  and  qualified  thinkers  and  writers  re- 
gardless of  their  special  bias  or  principles.  To 
strike  a  mean  between  the  British  abuse  of  gov- 
ernment by  hereditary  privilege  and  the  Amer- 
ican abuse  of  government  by  electoral  ma- 
chines he  ingeniously  proposes  the  election  of 
officials  by  the  jury  method,  twenty  or  thirty 
men  being  set  aside  by  lot  to  determine  the 
proper  holders  of  office.  And  he  is  convinced 
of  the  importance  in  a  democracy  of  abun- 
dant honors,  privileges,  even  titles,  and  abun- 
dant opportunities  for  fruitful  leisure. 

I  have  already  spoken  of  his  belief  that  the 
right  sociological  method  is  the  creation  and 
comparison  of  individual  Utopias.  Thus  his 
own  free-hand  sketch  of  a  better  world  is,  in 
fact,  a  criticism  of  all  previous  works  of  the 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  77 

kind.  As  distinguished  from  them  the  mod- 
ern Utopia,  he  says,  has  to  present  not  a  finally 
perfect  stage  but  a  hopefully  ascending  one; 
it  has  to  present  men  not  as  uniform  types  but 
as  conflicting  individualities  with  a  common 
bond ;  and  moreover  it  has  to  occupy,  not  some 
remote  island  or  province  "over  the  range"  but 
a  whole  planet.  The  Utopia  of  Wells  is  a 
world  which  differs  from  the  present  world  in 
one  fundamental  respect  only — it  has  one  in- 
itial advantage :  that  every  individual  in  it  has 
been  started  right,  in  the  degree  in  which  the 
collective  knowledge  of  the  world  has  rendered 
that  possible. 

But  there  is  no  need  for  me  to  say  anything 
more  about  these  books.  They  are  the  free  and 
suggestive  motions  of  a  mind  inexhaustibly 
fertile  and  given  to  many  devices.  Anyone  who 
has  read  Wells  at  all  is  aware  of  his  ingenuity, 
his  equal  capacity  for  large  schemes  and  mi- 
nute details,  his  truly  Japanese  belief  in  radical 
changes,  once  they  are  seen  to  be  necessary  and 
possible.  And  indeed  the  details  of  social  ar- 
rangement follow  naturally  and  profusely 
enough,  once  you  get  the  frame  of  mind  that 


78     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

wishes  them.  Wells  in  his  Utopia  presupposes 
the  frame  of  mind.  In  short,  he  puts  educa- 
tion first;  he  believes  that  the  essential  prob- 
lems of  the  present  are  not  economic  but  psy- 
chological. 

And  here  where  the  constructive  theory  of 
Wells  begins,  let  me  quote  a  passage  from  The 
New  Machiavelli  that  gives  the  gist  of  it: 

The  line  of  human  improvements  and  the  expansion 
of  human  life  lies  in  the  direction  of  education  and  finer 
initiatives.  If  humanity  cannot  develop  an  education 
far  beyond  anything  that  is  now  provided,  if  it  cannot 
collectively  invent  devices  and  solve  problems  on  a  much 
richer,  broader  scale  than  it  does  at  the  present  time, 
it  cannot  hope  to  achieve  any  very  much  finer  order  or 
any  more  general  happiness  than  it  now  enjoys.  We 
must  believe,  therefore,  that  it  can  develop  such  a  train- 
ing and  education,  or  we  must  abandon  secular  construc- 
tive hope.  And  here  my  initial  difficulty  as  against  crude 
democracy  comes  in.  If  humanity  at  large  is  capable 
of  that  high  education  and  those  creative  freedoms  our 
hope  demands,  much  more  must  its  better  and  more  vig- 
orous types  be  so  capable.  And  if  those  who  have  power 
and  scope  and  freedom  to  respond  to  imaginative  ap- 
peals cannot  be  won  to  the  idea  of  collective  self-devel- 
opment, then  the  whole  of  humanity  cannot  be  won  to 
that.  From  that  one  passes  to  what  has  become  my 
general  conception  in  politics,  the  conception  of  the  con- 
structive imagination  working  upon  the  vast  complex  of 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  79 

powerful  people,  enterprising  people,  influential  people, 
amidst  whom  power  is  diffused  to-day,  to  produce  that 
self-conscious,  highly  selective,  open-minded,  devoted, 
aristocratic  culture,  which  seems  to  me  to  be  the  neces- 
sary next  phase  in  the  development  of  human  affairs. 
I  see  human  progress,  not  as  the  spontaneous  product 
of  crowds  of  low  minds  swayed  by  elementary  needs,  but 
as  a  natural  but  elaborate  result  of  intricate  human  in- 
terdependencies,  of  human  energy  and  curiosity  liber- 
ated and  acting  at  leisure,  of  human  passions  and  mo- 
tives, modified  and  redirected  by  literature  and  art. 

This  permeation  of  the  head  men  of  the 
world,  this  creation  of  a  natural  collective- 
minded  aristocracy  appears  now  to  be  the 
permanent  hope  of  Wells.  It  is  the  stuff  of 
all  his  novels,  it  is  the  centre  of  his  ethical  sys- 
tem ;  and  his  Utopia  is  made  possible  by  the  ex- 
istence in  it  of  just  such  a  flexible  leading  caste 
— the  so-called  Samurai.  But  before  coming  to 
the  inner  implications  of  this,  to  the  individual 
and  personal  realities  and  difficulties  of  this,  I 
must  follow  the  development  of  the  idea  in 
Wells  himself.  At  various  times,  in  various 
works,  he  has  presented  it  from  a  dozen  differ- 
ent angles:  as  something  that  is  certain  to 
come,  as  something  he  greatly  desires  to  come, 


80     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

as  something  that  will  not  come  at  all  except 
through  prodigious  eff ort,  as  something  that 
will  come  through  a  general  catastrophe,  as 
something  that  will  come  through  isolated  in- 
dividual endeavor,  and  the  like.  That  is  to  say 
he  has  presented  his  idea  through  all  the  vari- 
ous literary  mediums  of  exposition,  fable,  pro- 
phecy, psychological  analysis,  and  ethical  ap- 
peal. 

It  appears  in  a  crude  form  in  his  first  avow- 
edly sociological  work,  Anticipations.  He  there 
attempts  to  show  that  the  chaos  of  society  is  of 
itself  beginning  to  generate  a  constructive 
class,  into  whose  hands  it  must  ultimately  fall. 
The  advance  of  mechanism,  he  predicts,  will 
produce  four  clearly  defined  classes:  an  im- 
mense shareholding  class  with  all  the  potential- 
ities of  great  property  and  a  complete  lack  of 
function  with  regard  to  that  property;  a  non- 
producing  class  of  middle-men  dependent  on 
these,  and  composed  of  agents,  managers,  law- 
yers, clerks,  brokers,  speculators,  typists,  and 
organizers ;  the  expropriated  class  of  property- 
less  and  functionless  poor,  whose  present  live- 
lihood is  dependent  on  the  fact  that  machin- 
ery is  not  yet  so  cheap  as  their  labor.  And 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  81 

amid  this  generally  disorganized  mass  a  fourth 
element  will  define  itself.  This  in  rudiment  is 
the  element  of  mechanics  and  engineers,  whose 
work  makes  it  necessary  for  them  to  under- 
stand the  machines  they  are  making  and  to  be 
continually  on  the  lookout  for  new  methods. 
These  men,  he  holds,  will  inevitably  develop  a 
common  character  based  on  a  self-wrought  sci- 
entific education  and  view  of  life.  About  them 
as  a  nucleus  all  the  other  skilled  and  construc- 
tive minds — doctors,  teachers,  investigators, 
writers,  and  the  like — will  tend  to  group  them- 
selves; and  as  the  other  classes  in  their  very 
nature  will  tend  to  social  disintegration,  these 
will  inevitably  grow  more  and  more  conscious 
of  a  purpose,  a  reason,  a  function  in  common, 
and  will  disentangle  themselves  from  the  aim- 
less and  functionless  masses  about  them. 
Democracy,  as  we  know  it,  will  meanwhile 
pass  away.  For  democratic  government  un- 
avoidably reduces  itself  to  government  by 
party  machines  and  party  machines  depend  for 
their  existence  on  alarms,  quarrelsome  patriot- 
isms, and  international  exasperations  whose 
almost  inevitable  outcome  is  war. 


82     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Whether  war  follows  or  not,  the  power  of 
society  is  bound  to  fall  into  the  hands  of  the 
scientifically  trained,  constructive  middle  class, 
because  this  class  is  the  only  indispensable  ele- 
ment in  it.  Without  war  this  must  occur  just 
as  soon  as  the  spending  and  purchasing  power 
of  the  shareholding  class  becomes  dependent 
for  its  existence  on  the  class  which  alone  can 
save  society  from  destruction.  With  war  it 
will  occur  with  even  greater  rapidity:  for  in 
the  warfare  of  the  future  that  nation  is  bound 
to  win  which  has  most  effectively  realized  so- 
cialist ideals,  in  which  the  government  can  com- 
mand, with  least  interference  from  private 
control,  its  roads,  its  food,  its  clothing,  its  ma- 
terial, its  resources,  which  has  most  efficiently 
organized  itself  as  a  whole;  and  the  class  that 
modern  warfare  will  bring  to  the  front  is  the 
class  that  knows  how  to  handle  machinery  and 
how  to  direct  it.  But  just  as  this  class  will  be 
the  most  efficient  in  war,  so  will  it  be  the  most 
careful  to  prevent  war:  it  will  in  fact  confirm 
the  ultimate  tendency  toward  a  World  State 
at  peace  with  itself,  through  the  agency,  not 
of  any  of  the  governments  that  we  know  to- 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  83 

day  but  of  an  informal  cooperative  organiza- 
tion which  is  altogether  outside  the  govern- 
mental systems  of  society,  and  which  may  in 
time  assimilate  the  greater  part  of  the  popu- 
lation of  the  world. 

Such  is  the  argument  of  this  book,  and  ex- 
cept for  the  inevitability  of  it — the  belief  that 
all  this  must  come  to  pass — Wells  has  not  since 
abandoned  it  in  any  essential  way.  The  new 
aristocracy  that  figures  there,  the  advance- 
guard  of  a  better  civilization,  is  precisely  the 
ethical  ideal  which  is  embodied  in  the  chief 
characters  of  his  novels.  Thus  too  the  Samurai 
of  A  Modern  Utopia  are  figured  as  having 
arisen  at  first  informally  as  the  constructive 
minds  disentangling  themselves  from  the  social 
chaos.  Gradually  becoming  aware  through  re- 
search, discussion  and  cooperation  of  a  com- 
mon purpose,  they  have  at  last  assumed  a  mili- 
tant form  and  supplanted  the  political  organ- 
izations of  the  world. 

The  general  intention  of  all  this  finds  utter- 
ance in  the  most  poetic  of  all  the  fables  of 
Wells,  The  Food  of  the  Gods.  The  Food  it- 
self, invented  by  two  undistinguished-looking 


84     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

scientists,  becomes  current  in  the  world 
through  the  very  haphazardness  of  a  society 
which  will  not  control  discoveries  detrimental 
to  it  and  which  consequently  has  no  means  of 
coping  with  a  discovery  capable  of  supersed- 
ing it.  "Heracleophorbia"  has  thus  the  same 
initial  advantage  as  Tono-Bungay  or  any  other 
shabby  patent  medicine.  It  has  an  additional 
advantage;  for  while  patent  medicines  have 
the  sanction  of  private  enterprise  and  are  con- 
trolled by  secret  patents  for  the  gain  of  their 
inventors,  the  Food  of  the  Gods,  like  every 
discovery  of  honorable  scientists,  is  given 
freely  to  the  world.  Thus  the  Food  and  the 
gigantic  race  of  supermen  who  spring  from 
it  and  bring  with  them  a  nobler  order  of  things 
are  themselves  generated  by  the  very  chaos 
they  promise  to  supplant.  Just  in  proportion 
as  the  inventors  are  frank  and  open  men,  hav- 
ing no  secret  gainful  purpose,  the  Food 
spreads  far  and  wide.  It  is  stolen,  spilled, 
scattered;  and  wherever  it  falls  every  living 
thing  grows  gigantic.  Immense  wasps  drone 
like  motor-cars  over  the  meadows,  chickens 
grow  as  large  as  emus,  and  here  and  there  a 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  85 

baby  fed  upon  it  and  unable  thereafter  to  ac- 
cept any  less  robust  diet  grows  gradually  to 
Rabelaisian  proportions.  Caddies,  a  type  of 
all  the  growing  giants,  comes  to  his  forty-foot 
maturity  in  a  remote  village  where,  as  the  mel- 
low vicar  observes,  "Things  change,  but  Hu- 
manity— aere  perennius"  There  he  is  taught 
by  the  little  folk  to  submit  himself  to  all  his 
governors,  teachers,  spiritual  pastors  and  mas- 
ters and  to  order  himself  lowly  and  reverently 
to  all  his  betters.  They  put  him  to  work  in 
the  chalk-pits,  where  he  learns  to  manage  a 
whole  quarry  single-handed  and  makes  of 
himself  a  rudimentary  engineer,  and  then  he 
breaks  loose  and  tramps  to  London.  He  finds 
himself  in  the  crowded  New  Kent  Road,  and 
they  tell  him  he  is  obstructing  the  traffic:  "But 
where  is  it  going?"  he  says;  "where  does  it 
come  from?  What  does  it  mean?"  Around 
him  play  the  electric  signs  advertising  Yank- 
er's  Yellow  Pills  and  Tupper's  Tonic  Wine 
for  Vigor,  conveying  to  his  troubled  mind  the 
significance  of  a  world  of  chaos  and  accident, 
perverted  instinct,  and  slavery  to  base  sugges- 
tion. 


86     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Is  it  necessary  to  say  that  society  becomes 
alarmed  at  last?  Is  it  necessary  to  add  that 
Wells  opens  fire  upon  it  with  his  whole  battery 
of  satire?  Plainly  men  and  giants  cannot  live 
in  the  same  world;  the  little  men  find  their  little 
ways,  their  sacred  customs  of  order,  home,  and 
religion  threatened  by  a  strange  new  thing. 
The  Children  of  the  Food  meanwhile  have 
grown  beyond  the  conventions  and  proportions 
of  common  life ;  they  have  experienced  a  kind 
of  humanity  to  which  all  men  can  attain  and 
from  which  there  can  be  no  retrogression  to 
the  lesser  scheme.  In  the  end,  having  found 
one  another,  they  assemble  in  their  embank- 
ment, the  world  against  them.  They  sit  amid 
their  vast  machinery,  Titanic  shapes  in  the 
darkness  broken  by  searchlights  and  the  flames 
of  their  forges.  An  ambassador  from  the  old 
order  brings  them  the  terms  upon  which  they 
may  go  free.  They  must  separate  themselves 
from  the  world  and  give  up  the  Food.  They 
refuse: 

"Suppose  we  give  up  this  thing  that  stirs 
within  us,"  says  the  Giant  Leaguer.     . 
"What  then?   Will  this  little  world  of  theirs  be 


SOCIALISM  "TRUE  AND  FALSE"  87 

as  it  was  before?  They  may  fight  against 
greatness  in  us  who  are  the  children  of  men, 
but  can  they  conquer?  .  .  .  For  greatness 
is  abroad,  and  not  only  in  us,  not  only  in  the 
Food,  but  in  the  purpose  of  all  things!  It  is 
in  the  nature  of  all  things,  it  is  part  of  time 
and  space.  To  grow  and  still  to  grow,  from 
first  to  last,  that  is  Being,  that  is  the  law  of 
life." 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  THE  NEW  REPUBLICAN 

IT  is  obvious  that  the  socialism  of  Wells, 
touching  as  it  does  at  every  point  the 
fabric  of  society,  remains  at  bottom  a  personal 
and  mystical  conception  of  life.  His  typical 
socialist,  or  constructive  man,  or  Samurai,  or 
New  Republican,  or  what  you  will,  is  as  dis- 
tinctly a  poetic  projection  from  life  as 
Nietzsche's  Superman,  or  Carlyle's  Hero,  or 
the  Superior  Man  of  Confucius.  Like  them, 
it  implies  a  rule  of  conduct  and  a  special  re- 
ligious attitude. 

Nietzsche's  Superman  is  a  convenient  figure 
by  which  for  the  moment  to  throw  into  relief 
the  point  I  have  in  mind.  Plainly  a  conception 
of  this  kind  should  never  be  intellectualized  and 
defined.  It  is  a  living  whole,  as  a  human  being 
is  a  living  whole,  and  the  only  way  to  grasp  it 
is  to  place  oneself  at  the  precise  angle  of  the 
poet  who  conceived  it.  But  the  fixed  intellect 

88 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  89 

of  man  is  not  often  capable  of  rising  to  the 
height  of  such  an  argument,  nor  do  the  run  of 
critics  and  interpreters  rise  to  such  a  height 
themselves.  In  the  case  of  Nietzsche,  particu- 
larly, they  have  confounded  the  confusion,  urg- 
ing precise  definitions  and  at  the  same  time  dis- 
agreeing among  themselves  as  to  which  defi- 
nitions may  be  held  valid.  But  indeed  the 
Superman  does  not  "mean"  this  or  that:  it  can 
merely  be  approached  from  different  points  of 
view  with  different  degrees  of  sympathy.  And 
so  it  is  with  the  New  Republican  of  Wells. 

I  have  mentioned  the  Superman  because 
Wells  himself  has  reached  a  conception  of  aris- 
tocracy similar  in  certain  respects  to  that  of 
Nietzsche  but  in  others  wholly  antagonistic.  In 
The  Food  of  the  Gods  he  certainly  exhibits  a 
sympathy  with  Nietzsche  on  the  poetical  and 
ideal  side ;  for  his  giants  are  not  simply  grand- 
children of  Rabelais,  they  practise  of  necessity 
a  morality  at  variance  with  that  of  the  little 
men  among  whom  they  grow.  When  Caddies 
comes  to  London  he  does  not,  and  cannot,  ex- 
pect the  little  men  to  feed  him;  not  intending 
evil  and  seeing  merely  that  he  must  live,  he 


90     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

sweeps  the  contents  of  a  baker's  shop  into  his 
mouth  with  just  the  unconcerned  innocence  of 
laws  and  prohibitions  that  a  child  would  feel 
before  a  blackberry  bush.  The  very  existence 
of  a  larger,  freer  race  implies  a  larger  and 
freer  morality,  and  the  giants  and  the  little 
•folk  alike  see  that  the  same  world  cannot  for 
long  contain  them  both.  But  perhaps  one  can 
mark  the  distinction  by  saying  that,  unlike  the 
Superman,  they  are  not  masters  but  servants 
of  the  cosmic  process.  They  themselves  are 
not  the  goal  toward  which  the  whole  creation 
tends.  Humanity  is  not  a  setting  for  their 
splendor,  but  something  that  wins  through 
them  its  own  significance. 

In  fact  it  fully  proves  how  profound  is  the 
socialistic  instinct  in  Wells,  that  though  in 
English  wise  and  almost  in  the  manner  of  Car- 
lyle  he  has  come  to  believe  in  the  great  ones  of 
this  world,  he  has  never  lost  the  invincible  so- 
cialist conviction  that  a  great  man  is  only  a 
figure  of  speech.  In  The  Discovery  of  the 
Future  he  says :  "I  must  confess  that  I  believe 
that  if  by  some  juggling  with  space  and  time 
Julius  Cgesar,  Napoleon,  Edward  IV,  Wil- 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  91 

liam  the  Conqueror,  Lord  Rosebery,  and  Rob- 
ert Burns  had  all  been  changed  at  birth,  it 
would  not  have  produced  any  serious  disloca- 
tion of  the  course  of  destiny.  I  believe  that 
these  great  men  of  ours  are  no  more  than 
images  and  symbols  and  instruments  taken,  as 
it  were,  haphazard  by  the  incessant  and  con- 
sistent forces  behind  them."  The  individual 
who  stands  on  his  achievement,  the  "lord  of 
creation,"  is  to  him  at  best  a  little  misinformed, 
at  the  worst  blustering,  dishonest,  presuming, 
absurd. 

By  an  original  instinct  the  Wells  hero  is  an 
inconspicuous  little  person,  fastidiously  unthe- 
atrical,  who  cuts  no  figure  personally  and  who, 
to  adopt  a  phrase  from  one  of  his  later  books, 
"escapes  from  individuality  in  science  and  ser- 
vice." He  abhors  "personages."  For  the  per- 
sonage is  one  who,  in  some  degree,  stands  on 
his  achievement,  and  to  Wells  man,  both  in  his 
love  and  his  work,  is  experimental:  he  is  an 
experiment  toward  an  impersonal  synthesis, 
the  well-being  of  the  species.  It  is  true  that 
this  idea  of  man  as  an  experiment  does  not  con- 
flict with  a  very  full  development  of  personal- 


92     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

ity.  It  consists  in  that;  but  personality  to 
Wells  is  attained  purely  through  love  and 
work,  and  thus  it  comes  to  an  end  the  moment 
it  becomes  static,  the  moment  one  accepts  the 
laurel  wreath,  the  moment  one  verges  on  self- 
consequence. 

The  first  published  utterance  of  Wells  was,  I 
think,  a  paper  in  The  Fortnightly  Review  for 
July,  1891,  called  The  Rediscovery  of  the 
Unique.  It  was  one  of  the  earliest  of  those 
attacks  on  the  logical  approach  to  life,  so  char- 
acteristic of  contemporary  thought :  it  stamped 
him  from  the  outset  a  pragmatist.  The  burden 
of  his  argument  was  that  since  the  investiga- 
tions of  Darwin  it  is  no  longer  possible  to  ig- 
nore the  uniqueness  of  every  individual  thing 
in  the  universe  and  that  "we  only  arrive  at  the 
idea  of  similar  beings  by  an  unconscious  or 
deliberate  disregard  of  an  infinity  of  small 
differences" — that,  in  brief,  the  method  of 
classification  which  is  the  soul  of  logic  is  untrue 
to  the  facts  of  life.  "Human  reason,"  he 
wrote,  "in  the  light  of  what  is  being  advanced, 
appears  as  a  convenient  organic  process  based 
on  a  fundamental  happy  misconception.  .  .  . 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  93 

The  reason  d'etre  of  a  man's  mind  is  to  avoid 
danger  and  get  food — so  the  naturalists  tell  us. 
His  reasoning  powers  are  about  as  much  a 
truth-seeking  tool  as  the  snout  of  a  pig,  and  he 
may  as  well  try  to  get  to  the  bottom  of  things 
by  them  as  a  mole  might  by  burrowing." 

I  quote  thus  his  rudely  graphic  early  state- 
ment of  the  case,  because  he  has  not  since  sub- 
stantially modified  it  and  because  it  shows  that 
he  already  related  it  to  human  realities:  and 
indeed  in  the  same  paper  he  pointed  out  the  re- 
lation that  such  an  idea  must  bear  to  ordinary 
conduct: 

Beings  are  unique,  circumstances  are  unique,  and 
therefore  we  cannot  think  of  regulating  our  conduct  by 
wholesale  dicta.  A  strict  regard  for  truth  compels  us 
to  add  that  principles  are  wholesale  dicta:  they  are  sub- 
stitutes of  more  than  doubtful  value  for  an  individual 
study  of  cases. 

This  conception  of  human  reason  as  an  al- 
together inadequate  organ  for  getting  at  the 
truth  of  things  he  later  expanded  in  his  Ox- 
ford lecture,  Scepticism  of  the  Instrument; 
and,  still  further  expanded,  it  forms  the  first 
or  metaphysical  book  of  his  First  and  Last 


94     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Things.  It  is  unnecessary  to  discuss  the 
rights  and  wrongs  of  this  primary  point 
in  a  generation  familiar  with  James  and 
Bergson.  It  is  an  assumption  of  the  purely 
personal,  experimental  nature  of  truth  which 
has  had  a  sufficient  sanction  of  experience 
greatly  to  modify  contemporary  practice  in 
ethics  and  sociology.  And  it  should  be  noted 
that  Wells  evolved  it  in  his  own  study  of  physi- 
cal science  (a  study  serious  enough  to  result  in 
text-books  of  Biology,  Zoology,  and  Physi- 
ography) and  that  he  presents  it,  in  accordance 
with  his  own  postulates,  not  as  truth  for  every- 
body, but  as  his  own  personal  contribution  to 
the  sum  of  experience.  The  study  of  science 
led  him  to  see  the  limitations  of  the  scientific 
attitude,  outside  the  primary  physical  sciences 
which  for  practical  purposes  can  afford  to  ig- 
nore individualities,  in  matters  that  approach 
the  world  of  human  motives  and  affairs. 

I  do  not  propose  to  discuss  this  question  of 
logic.  It  is  quite  plain  at  least,  as  Wells  ob- 
serves, in  the  spirit  of  Professor  James,  that 
"all  the  great  and  important  beliefs  by  which 
life  is  guided  and  determined  are  less  of  the 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  95 

nature  of  fact  than  of  artistic  expression." 
And  therefore  he  is  justified  in  proceeding  as 
follows : 

I  make  my  beliefs  as  I  want  them.  I  do  not  attempt 
to  go  to  fact  for  them.  I  make  them  thus  and  not  thus 
exactly  as  an  artist  makes  a  picture  so  and  not  so.  ... 
That  does  not  mean  that  I  make  them  wantonly  and  re- 
gardless of  fact.  .  .  .  The  artistic  method  in  this  field 
of  beliefs,  as  in  the  field  of  visual  renderings,  is  one 
of  great  freedom  and  initiative  and  great  poverty  of 
test,  that  is  all,  but  of  no  wantonness ;  the  conditions  of 
Tightness  are  none  the  less  imperative  because  they  are 
mysterious  and  indefinable.  I  adopt  certain  beliefs  be- 
cause I  feel  the  need  of  them,  because  I  feel  an  often 
quite  unanalyzable  Tightness  in  them,  because  the  alter- 
native of  a  chaotic  life  distresses  me. 

And  this  is  the  way  in  which  he  presents  the 
gist  of  his  beliefs : 

I  see  myself  in  life  as  part  of  a  great  physical  be- 
ing that  strains  and  I  believe  grows  toward  Beauty,  and 
of  a  great  mental  being  that  strains  and  I  believe  grows 
towards  knowledge  and  power.  In  this  persuasion  that 
I  am  a  gatherer  of  experience,  a  mere  tentacle  that  ar- 
ranged thought  beside  thought  for  this  Being  of  the  Spe- 
cies, this  Being  that  grows  beautiful  and  powerful,  in 
this  persuasion  I  find  the  ruling  idea  of  which  I  stand 
in  need,  the  ruling  idea  that  reconciles  and  adjudicates 


96     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

among  my  warring  motives.  In  it  I  find  both  concen- 
tration of  myself  and  escape  from  myself,  in  a  word,  I 
find  Salvation. 

And  again  later: 

The  race  flows  through  us,  the  race  is  the  drama  and 
we  are  the  incidents.  This  is  not  any  sort  of  poetical 
statement:  it  is  a  statement  of  fact.  In  so  far  as  we 
are  individuals,  so  far  as  we  seek  to  follow  merely  indi- 
vidual ends,  we  are  accidental,  disconnected,  without  sig- 
nificance, the  sport  of  chance.  In  so  far  as  we  realize 
ourselves  as  experiments  of  the  species  for  the  species, 
just  in  so  far  do  we  escape  from  the  accidental  and 
the  chaotic.  We  are  episodes  in  an  experience  greater 
than  ourselves.  .  .  .  Now  none  of  this,  if  you  read  me 
aright,  makes  for  the  suppression  of  one's  individual 
difference,  but  it  does  make  for  its  correlation.  We 
have  to  get  everything  we  can  out  of  ourselves  for  this 
very  reason  that  we  do  not  stand  alone;  we  signify  as 
parts  of  a  universal  and  immortal  development.  Our 
separate  selves  are  our  charges,  the  talents  of  which 
much  has  to  be  made.  It  is  because  we  are  episodical 
in  the  great  synthesis  of  life  that  we  have  to  make  the 
utmost  of  our  individual  lives  and  traits  and  possi- 
bilities. 

Naturally  then,  just  as  he  holds  by  the  exist- 
ing State  as  a  rudimentary  collective  organ  in 
public  affairs,  so  also,  in  theory,  he  holds  by 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  97 

the  existing  Church.  His  Church  of  the  Fu- 
ture bears  to  the  existing  Church  just  the  rela- 
tion which  the  ultimate  State  of  socialism  bears 
to  the  existing  State.  "The  theory  of  a  relig- 
ion," says  Wells,  "may  propose  the  attainment 
of  Nirvana  or  the  propitiation  of  an  irascible 
Deity  or  a  dozen  other  things  as  its  end  and 
aim.  The  practical  fact  is  that  it  draws  to- 
gether great  multitudes  of  diverse  individual- 
ized people  in  a  common  solemnity  and  self- 
subordination,  however  vague,  and  is  so  far 
like  the  State,  and  in  a  manner  far  more  inti- 
mate and  emotional  and  fundamental  than  the 
State,  a  synthetic  power.  And  in  particular 
the  idea  of  the  Catholic  Church  is  charged  with 
synthetic  suggestion;  it  is  in  many  ways  an 
idea  broader  and  finer  than  the  constructive 
idea  of  any  existing  State." 

All  of  which  I  take  to  be  very  much  the  posi- 
tion of  Erasmus  face  to  face  with  Luther  and 
of  Matthew  Arnold  face  to  face  on  the  one 
hand  with  Nonconformity  and  on  the  other 
with  Darwinism:  that  the  Church  is  a  social 
fact  greater  in  importance  than  any  dogmatic 
system  it  contains.  To  Wells  any  sort  of  vol- 


98     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

untary  self -isolation,  any  secession  from  any- 
thing really  synthetic  in  society,  is  a  form  of 
"sin."  And  like  many  Catholics  he  justifies  a 
certain  Machiavelism  in  squaring  one's  per- 
sonal doubts  with  the  collective  end.  Thus  he 
holds  that  test  oaths  and  declarations  of  formal 
belief  are  of  the  same  nature  as  the  oath  of  al- 
legiance a  republican  takes  to  the  King,  petty 
barriers  that  cannot  weigh  against  the  good 
that  springs  from  placing  oneself  en  rapport 
with  the  collective  religious  consciousness;  at 
least  in  the  case  of  national  Churches,  which 
profess  to  represent  the  whole  spiritual  life  of 
a  nation  and  which  cannot  therefore  be  re- 
garded as  exclusive  to  any  affirmative  religious 
man.  The  individual,  he  says,  must  examine 
his  special  case  and  weigh  the  element  of 
treachery  against  the  possibility  of  coopera- 
tion ;  as  far  as  possible  he  must  repress  his  pri- 
vate tendency  toward  social  fragmentation, 
hold  fast  to  the  idea  of  the  Church  as  essentially 
a  larger  fact  than  any  specific  religious  beliefs, 
and  work  within  it  for  the  recognition  of  this 
fact.  I  have  mentioned  Catholic  reasoning; 
Wells  appears  to  be  in  general  agreement  with 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  99 

Newman  as  to  the  subordination  of  private  in- 
tellectual scruples  to  the  greater  unity  of  faith. 

But  indeed  I  doubt  if  it  is  fair  to  take  him 
too  much  at  his  word  in  specific  matters  of  this 
kind.  First  and  Last  Things  has  that  slightly 
official  quality  which  goes  with  all  Confessions 
of  Faith  out  loud.  If  his  intention  has  led  him 
to  square  himself  with  lines  of  thought  and 
conduct  where,  to  speak  the  truth,  he  is  an 
alien,  his  intention  remains,  and  that  is  plain 
and  fine. 

The  synthetic  motive  gains  its  very  force 
through  the  close-knitting  of  keenly-devel- 
oped, proud,  and  valiant  individualities.  In 
Wells  the  synthetic  motive  and  the  individual 
motive  qualify  and  buttress  one  another;  and 
he  is  quite  as  much  opposed  to  the  over-pre- 
dominance of  the  synthetic  motive  where  the 
personal  motive  is  deficient  as  he  is  to  the  self- 
indulgence  of  the  purely  personal  life.  Thus 
the  Assembly  in  A  Modern  Utopia  is  required 
to  contain  a  certain  number  of  men  outside  the 
Samurai  class,  because,  as  they  explain,  "there 
is  a  certain  sort  of  wisdom  that  comes  of  sin 
and  laxriess,  which  is  necessary  to  the  perfect 


100     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

ruling  of  life,"  and  their  Canon  contains  a 
prayer  "to  save  the  world  from  unfermented 
men."  So  also  in  First  and  Last  Things 
Wells  remarks :  "If  I  were  a  father  confessor 
I  should  begin  my  catalogue  of  sins  by  asking, 
'Are  you  a  man  of  regular  life?'  and  I  would 
charge  my  penitent  to  go  away  forthwith  and 
commit  some  practicable  saving  irregularity; 
to  fast  or  get  drunk  or  climb  a  mountain  or 
sup  on  pork  and  beans  or  give  up  smoking  or 
spend  a  month  with  publicans  and  sinners." 
Plainly  his  collective  purpose  is  nothing  unless 
it  consists  of  will,  will  even  to  wilfulness,  even 
to  perversity. 

And  this  leads  one  back  to  that  early  asser- 
tion of  his  that  since  beings  and  circumstances 
are  unique,  we  must  get  rid  of  the  idea  that 
conduct  should  be  regulated  by  general  prin- 
ciples. Similarly,  at  the  outset  of  Mankind  in 
the  Making  he  says  it  is  necessary  "to  reject 
and  set  aside  all  abstract,  refined,  and  intel- 
lectualized  ideas  as  starting  propositions,  such 
ideas  as  Right,  Liberty,  Happiness,  Duty,  or 
Beauty,  and  to  hold  fast  to  the  assertion  of  the 
fundamental  nature  of  life  as  a  tissue  and  sue- 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  101 

cession  of  births."  Goodness  and  Beauty,  he 
says,  cannot  be  considered  apart  from  good 
and  beautiful  things  and  one's  personal  notions 
of  the  good  and  beautiful  have  to  be  deter- 
mined by  one's  personal  belief  about  the  mean- 
ing of  life.  Thus,  to  take  an  illustration  from 
his  novels,  one  of  the  most  odious  traits  of  such 
a  father  as  Ann  Veronica's  or  Mr.  Pope  in 
Marriage  is  that  they  wish  to  regulate  their 
daughters,  not  by  a  study  of  what  is  and  must 
be  good  in  their  eyes,  but  by  a  general  sweep- 
ing view  of  what  good  daughters  ought  to  be. 
Now  since  his  own  idea  of  the  purpose  of 
life  is  the  development  of  the  collective  con- 
sciousness of  the  race,  his  idea  of  the  Good  is 
that  which  contributes  to  this  synthesis,  and  the 
Good  Life  is  that  which,  as  he  says,  "most 
richly  gathers  and  winnows  and  prepares  ex- 
perience and  renders  it  available  for  the  race, 
that  contributes  most  effectively  to  the  collec- 
tive growth."  And  as  a  corollary  to  this,  Sin 
is  essentially  "the  service  of  secret  and  personal 
ends."  The  conflict  in  one  way  or  another  be- 
tween this  Good  and  this  Evil  forms  the  sub- 
stance of  each  of  the  main  group  of  his  novels. 


102     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Aside  from  the  novels  of  shop-life,  each  of  his 
principal  men  begins  life  with  a  passionate  and 
disinterested  ambition  to  gather  and  prepare 
experience  and  render  it  available  for  the  race ; 
each  one  falls  from  this  ambition  to  the  service 
of  secret  and  personal  ends.  Lewisham,  Capes, 
Ponderevo,  Remington,  Traff ord  are,  each  in 
his  own  way,  human  approximations,  with  all 
the  discount  of  actual  life,  of  the  ethical  stand- 
ard of  Wells  himself  as  it  is  generalized  in  the 
New  Republicans  and  the  Samurai.  They  il- 
lustrate how  fully  the  socialism  of  Wells  is 
summed  up  in  a  conception  of  character. 

But  before  turning  to  the  actual  men  and 
women  who  form  the  substance  of  his  novels, 
I  must  add  something  about  those  wraith-like 
beings,  the  Samurai  of  A  Modern  Utopia, 
which  fully  embody  his  ideal. 

The  name  Samurai,  to  begin  with,  is  not  a 
random  choice,  for  it  is  plain  that  the  Japanese 
temper  is  akin  to  that  of  Wells.  The  career 
of  the  Japanese  as  a  nation  during  the  last 
fifty  years  perfectly  illustrates  his  frequent 
contention  that  in  modern  warfare  success  falls 
to  the  nation  that  has  most  completely  realized 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  103 

the  socialistic,  as  distinguished  from  the  indi- 
vidualistic, notion  of  society.  "Behind  her 
military  capacity  is  the  disciplined  experience 
of  a  thousand  years,"  says  Lafcadio  Hearn, 
who  proceeds  to  show  at  what  cost,  in  every- 
thing we  are  apt  to  regard  as  human,  this  dis- 
ciplined power  has  been  achieved — the  cost  of 
individual  privacy  in  rights,  property,  and  con- 
duct. 

But  aside  from  social  ideals  and  achieve- 
ments one  instinctively  feels  that  Wells  likes 
Japanese  human  nature.  In  one  of  his  early 
essays,  long  since  out  of  print,  he  remarks: 

I  like  my  art  unadorned;  thought  and  skill  and  the 
other  strange  quality  that  is  added  thereto  to  make 
things  beautiful — and  nothing  more.  A  farthing's  worth 
of  paint  and  paper,  and  behold !  a  thing  of  beauty ! — as 
they  do  in  Japan.  And  if  it  should  fall  into  the  fire — 
well,  it  has  gone  like  yesterday's  sunset,  and  to-morrow 
there  will  be  another. 

He  contrasts  this  with  the  ordinary  English 
view  of  art  and  property,  mahogany  furniture 
and  "handsome"  possessions: 

The  pretence  that  they  were  the  accessories  to  hu- 
man life  was  too  transparent.  We  were  the  accessories; 


104     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

we  minded  them  for  a  little  while,  and  then  we  passed 
away.  They  wore  us  out  and  cast  us  aside.  We  were 
the  changing  scenery;  they  were  the  actors  who  played 
on  through  the  piece. 

There  is  no  Being  but  Becoming  is  the 
special  dictum  of  Wells,  a  dictum  which  does 
not  consort  with  mahogany  sideboards,  but 
is  tangibly  expressed  in  Japanese  architec- 
ture. And  if  Wells  naturally  likes  Japan- 
ese art,  its  economy,  delicacy,  ephemerality, 
its  catlike  nicety,  its  paucity  of  color,  its  em- 
phasis of  design,  its  "starkness,"  it  is  plain  also 
that  many  qualities  of  the  Japanese  character 
must  also  appeal  irresistibly  to  him:  the  light 
hold  they  have  on  all  those  things  into  which 
one  settles  down,  from  stolid  leather  arm- 
chairs to  comfortable  private  fortunes;  their 
lack  of  self-consequence,  their  alertness,  their 
athletic  freedom  from  everything  that  encum- 
bers, their  remoteness  from  port-wine  and  em- 
bonpoint. These  things  exist  in  Wells's  notion 
of  right  human  nature. 

Thus  the  Samurai.  They  are  delegates  of 
the  species,  experimenting  and  searching  for 
new  directions;  they  instinctively  view  them- 


NEW  REPUBLICAN  105 

selves  as  explorers  for  the  race,  as  disinter- 
ested agents.  And  their  own  self-development 
on  this  disinterested  basis  is  not  only  the  pur- 
pose of  their  own  lives,  but  also  the  method  by 
which  the  Life  Impulse  discovers  and  records 
itself  and  pushes  on  to  ever  wider  and  richer 
manifestations. 

The  socialism  of  Wells  is  merely  a  building 
out  from  this  conception.  He  is  persuaded 
that  this  kind  of  experimental  exercise  is  not 
simply  a  happy  indulgence  for  the  few  for- 
tunately placed,  but  that  it  is  actually  virtue 
and  the  only  virtue.  And  this  notion  of  per- 
sonal virtue — personal  in  quality,  social  in  ef- 
fect— once  conceded,  it  follows  that  the  mould- 
ing of  life  must  proceed  with  reference  to  this. 


CHAPTER  V 

HUMAN   NATURE 

nnHERE  is  always  a  certain  disadvantage 
JL  in  approaching  human  nature  through  a 
theory  or  in  the  light  of  an  ideal.  If  I  am 
doing  that,  it  is  my  own  fault  and  by  no  means 
the  fault  of  Wells.  He  has  himself  abandoned 
socialism,  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  term,  be- 
cause it  has  too  much  of  the  a  priori  about  it; 
he  has  abandoned  economics  because  it  deals 
with  man  as  a  mass-mind;  he  has  come  to  rest 
in  human  nature  itself  and  he  has  made  his 
theories  subject  to  human  nature. 

"All  fables,  indeed,  have  their  morals;  but 
the  innocent  enjoy  the  story,"  says  Thoreau. 
Most  readers  of  the  novels  of  Wells,  I  suppose, 
have  no  notion  that  a  theory  of  life  runs 
through  them  and  unites  them.  And  they  are 
right.  The  force  of  a  work  of  art  does  not 
reside  in  its  "inner  meanings."  An  admirable 
work  of  art  will  always  no  doubt  possess  "inner 

106 


HUMAN  NATURE  107 

meanings"  in  plenty  and  the  unhappy  mind  of 
man  will  always  rout  them  out.  But  to  sepa- 
rate the  intellectual  structure  of  anything  from 
the  thing  itself  is  just  like  any  other  kind  of 
vivisection:  you  expose  the  brain  and  you  kill 
the  dog.  A  work  of  art  is  a  moving  living 
whole  that  speaks  to  the  moving  living  whole 
which  is  oneself.  We  are  insensibly  modified 
by  reading  as  by  other  experience.  We  come 
to  feel  differently,  see  differently,  act  differ- 
ently. Without  doubt  Wells  has  altered  the 
air  we  breathe  and  has  made  a  conscious  fact 
in  many  minds  the  excellence  that  resides  in 
certain  types  of  men  and  modes  of  living  and 
the  odiousness  that  resides  in  others.  Social- 
ism, like  everything  else  which  changes  the 
world,  comes  as  a  thief  in  the  night. 

Still,  it  is  plain  that  Wells  himself  began 
with  doctrine  foremost;  richness  of  experience 
has  led  him  only  after  many  years  to  get  the 
horse  before  the  cart.  From  the  first  he  was 
aware  of  a  point  of  view — it  was  the  point  of 
view,  writ  large,  of  his  own  self-made  career, 
growing  gradually  more  and  more  coherent. 
Throughout  his  romances,  down  to  the  very 


108    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

end,  his  chief  interest  was  theoretical  rather 
than  human.  Only  this  can  account  for  the 
violent  wrenching  of  life  and  character  in  them 
to  suit  the  requirements  of  a  predetermined 
idea.  The  Food  of  the  Gods,  for  example,  is 
so  far  the  essential  fact  of  the  book  that  bears 
its  name  that  the  characters  in  this  book  are 
merely  employed  to  give  the  Food  a  recogniz- 
able human  setting.  Throughout  his  romances, 
indeed,  men  exist  for  inventions,  not  inventions 
for  men. 

Yet  the  "human  interest,"  as  it  is  called,  was 
there  from  the  outset,  side  by  side  with  this 
main  theoretic  interest  in  the  scientific  and  so- 
cialistic possibilities  of  life.  The  series  of  nov- 
els began  almost  as  early  as  the  series  of 
romances.  Two  "streams  of  tendency"  run 
side  by  side  throughout  the  earlier  writings  of 
Wells — streams  of  tendency  which  meet  fully 
for  the  first  time  in  Tono-Bungay,  and  have 
formed  a  single  main  current  in  the  novels  sub- 
sequent to  that.  On  the  one  hand  was  the 
stream  of  constructive  theory,  not  yet  brought 
into  contact  with  human  nature,  on  the  other 
the  stream  of  "human  interest,"  not  yet 


HUMAN  NATURE  109 

brought  into  contact  with  constructive  theory. 
Mr.  Hoopdriver,  of  The  Wheels  of  Chance, 
and  Kipps,  are  typical  of  this  earlier  fiction, 
specimens  of  muddled  humanity  as  such,  one 
might  say,  quite  unmitigated  by  the  train  of 
thought,  the  possibility  of  doing  something 
with  muddled  humanity,  which  was  growing 
more  and  more  urgent  in  the  romances. 

In  Tono-Bungay,  as  I  have  said,  one  sees  the 
union  of  these  two  trains  of  interest,  muddled 
humanity  being  represented  in  Uncle  Ponde- 
revo,  constructive  theory  in  George  Ponderevo. 
And  in  all  the  subsequent  novels  this  fusion 
continues.  The  background  in  each  case  is  the 
static  world  of  muddle  from  which  Wells  is 
always  pushing  off  into  the  open  sea  of  possi- 
bilities, the  foreground  being  occupied  by  a 
series  of  men  and  women  who  represent  this 
dynamic  forward  movement.  And  the  philos- 
ophy of  Wells  has  finally  come  to  port  in 
human  nature. 

"Few  modern  socialists,"  he  says  somewhere, 
"present  their  faith  as  a  complete  panacea,  and 
most  are  now  setting  to  work  in  earnest  upon 
those  long-shirked  preliminary  problems  of 


110     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

human  interaction  through  which  the  vital 
problem  of  a  collective  head  and  brain  can 
alone  be  approached."  And  elsewhere  he  says : 
"Our  real  perplexities  are  altogether  psycho- 
logical. There  are  no  valid  arguments  against 
a  great-spirited  socialism  but  this,  that  people 
will  not.  Indolence,  greed,  meanness  of  spirit, 
the  aggressiveness  of  authority,  and  above  all 
jealousy,  jealousy  from  pride  and  vanity,  jeal- 
ousy for  what  we  esteem  our  possessions,  jeal- 
ousy for  those  upon  whom  we  have  set  the 
heavy  fetters  of  our  love,  a  jealousy  of  criti- 
cism and  association,  these  are  the  real  obstacles 
to  those  brave  large  reconstructions,  those 
profitable  abnegations  and  brotherly  feats  of 
generosity  that  will  yet  turn  human  life — of 
which  our  individual  lives  are  but  the  momen- 
tary parts — into  a  glad,  beautiful  and  tri- 
umphant cooperation  all  round  this  sunlit 
world." 

Inevitably  then  he  sees  the  world  as  divided 
roughly  into  two  worlds,  and  human  nature  as 
of  two  general  kinds.  There  is  the  static 
world,  the  normal,  ordinary  world  which  is  on 
the  whole  satisfied  with  itself,  together  with 


HUMAN  NATURE  111 

the  great  mass  of  men  who  compose  and  sanc- 
tion it;  and  there  is  the  ever-advancing  better 
world,  pushing  through  this  outworn  husk  in 
the  minds  and  wills  of  creative  humanity.  In 
one  of  his  essays  he  has  figured  this  opposition 
as  between  what  he  calls  the  Normal  Social 
Life  and  the  Great  State.  And  in  one  of  those 
degage  touch-and-go  sketches  in  which  he  so 
often  sums  up  the  history  of  humankind,  he 
has  presented  the  Normal  Social  Life  as  a 
"common  atmosphere  of  cows,  hens,  dung,  toil, 
ploughing,  economy,  and  domestic  intimacy," 
an  immemorial  state  of  being  which  implies  on 
the  part  of  men  and  women  a  perpetual  ac- 
quiescence— a  satisfied  or  hopeless  consent — to 
the  end  of  time.  But  as  against  this  normal 
conception  of  life  he  points  out  that  modern 
circumstances  have  developed  in  men,  through 
machinery,  the  division  of  labor,  etc.,  a  "sur- 
plus life"  which  does  not  fit  into  the  Normal 
scheme  at  all,  and  that  humanity  has  returned 
"from  a  closely  tethered  to  a  migratory  ex- 
istence." And  he  observes:  "The  history  of 
the  immediate  future  will,  I  am  convinced,  be 
very  largely  the  history  of  the  conflict  of  the 


112     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

needs  of  this  new  population  with  the  institu- 
tions, the  boundaries,  the  laws,  prejudices,  and 
deep-rooted  traditions  established  during  the 
home-keeping,  localized  era  of  mankind's 
career." 

Two  conceptions  of  life,  two  general  types 
of  character,  two  ethical  standards  are  here  set 
in  opposition,  and  this  opposition  is  maintained 
throughout  the  novels  of  Wells.  Thus  on  the 
title-page  of  The  New  Machiavelli  appears 
the  following  quotation  from  Professor 
James:  "It  suffices  for  our  immediate  pur- 
pose that  tender-minded  and  tough-minded 
people  ...  do  both  exist."  In  A  Modern 
Utopia  this  division  appears  typically  in  the 
two  men  from  our  world  who  play  off  against 
one  another,  the  botanist  and  the  narrator  of 
the  story.  The  "tender-mindedness"  of  the 
botanist  is  exhibited  in  the  fact  that  he  cares 
nothing  for  a  better  world  if  it  is  to  deprive 
him  of  the  muddled,  inferior  and  sentimental 
attachments  of  his  accustomed  life,  and  prefers 
them  to  the  austerer,  braver  prospect  that  is 
offered  him.  "Tough-mindedness,"  on  the 
other  hand,  is  above  all  the  state  of  living,  not 


HUMAN  NATURE  113 

in  one's  attachments,  habits,  possessions,  not  in 
the  rut  of  least  resistance,  but  in  the  sense  of 
one's  constructive  and  cooperative  relationship 
to  the  whole  sum  of  things,  in  being  "a  con- 
scious part  of  that  web  of  effort  and  per- 
plexity which  wraps  about  our  globe."  And 
indeed  the  constant  theme  of  the  novels  of 
Wells  might  be  described  as  tough-mindedness 
with  lapses. 

For  the  heroes  of  Wells  do  lapse:  they  pay 
that  tribute  to  "human  nature"  and  the  over- 
whelming anti-social  forces  in  the  world  and 
in  man  himself.  They  fall,  as  a  rule,  from 
"virtue"  to  the  service  of  secret  and  personal 
ends.  Cherchez  la  femme.  Mr.  Lewisham,  in- 
sufficiently prepared  and  made  to  feel  that  so- 
ciety does  not  want  him,  has  to  give  up  his 
disinterested  ambitions  in  science  and  scramble 
for  money  to  support  a  wife  whom  instinct  has 
urged  him,  however  imprudently,  to  marry. 
George  Ponderevo  gives  up  science  and  is 
forced  into  abetting  his  uncle's  patent  medi- 
cine enterprise  for  the  same  reason.  For  the 
same  reason,  too,  Capes  takes  to  commercial 
play- writing  to  support  Ann  Veronica;  and  to 


114     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

stand  behind  the  extravagance  of  Marjorie, 
Trafford,  having  discovered  in  his  researches 
an  immensely  valuable  method  of  making  arti- 
ficial india-rubber  which  he  is  going  to  make 
public  for  the  use  of  society,  is  persuaded  to 
compromise  his  honor  as  a  scientist  and  monop- 
olize his  discovery  for  private  gain.  In  Tono- 
Bungay  the  enterprise  is  a  swindling  patent 
medicine,  which  many  business  men  would  re- 
fuse to  have  anything  to  do  with ;  but  in  Mar- 
riage the  proposition  belongs  to  what  is  called 
"legitimate  business,"  and  it  may  be  well  to 
quote  a  passage  to  show  the  subtlety  and,  at 
the  same  time,  from  this  point  of  view,  the  very 
substantial  nature  of  temptation  and  sin : 

Solomonson  had  consulted  Trafford  about  this  mat- 
ter at  Vevey,  and  had  heard  with  infinite  astonishment 
that  Trafford  had  already  roughly  prepared  and  was 
proposing  to  complete  and  publish,  unpatented  and  ab- 
solutely unprotected,  first  a  smashing  demonstration  of 
the  unsoundness  of  Behren's  claim  and  then  a  lucid  ex- 
position of  just  what  had  to  be  done  and  what  could 
be  done  to  make  an  india-rubber  absolutely  indistin- 
guishable from  the  natural  product.  The  business  man 
could  not  believe  his  ears. 

"My  dear  chap,  positively — you  mustn't!"  Solomon- 


HUMAN  NATURE  115 

son  had  screamed.  .  .  .  "Don't  you  see  all  you  are 
throwing  away?" 

"I  suppose  it's  our  quality  to  throw  such  things 
away/'  said  Trafford.  .  .  .  "When  men  dropped  that 
idea  of  concealing  knowledge,  alchemist  gave  place  to 
chemist,  and  all  that  is  worth  having  in  modern  life,  all 
that  makes  it  better  and  safer  and  more  hopeful  than 
the  ancient  life  began." 

"My  dear  fellow,"  said  Solomonson,  "I  know,  I  know. 
But  to  give  away  the  synthesis  of  rubber!  To  just 
shove  it  out  of  the  window  into  the  street!"  .  .  . 
Everything  that  had  made  Trafford  up  to  the  day  of  his 
marriage  was  antagonistic  to  such  strategic  reservations. 
The  servant  of  science  has  as  such  no  concern  with 
personal  consequences;  his  business  is  the  steady  relent- 
less clarification  of  knowledge.  The  human  affairs  he 
changes,  the  wealth  he  makes  or  destroys,  are  no  concern 
of  his;  once  these  things  weigh  with  him,  become  pri- 
mary, he  has  lost  his  honor  as  a  scientific  man. 

"But  you  must  think  of  consequences,"  Solomon- 
son  had  cried  during  those  intermittent  talks  at  Vevey. 
"Here  you  are,  shying  this  cheap  synthetic  rubber  of 
yours  into  the  world — for  it's  bound  to  be  cheap !  any- 
one can  see  that — like  a  bomb  into  a  market-place. 
What's  the  good  of  saying  you  don't  care  about  the  mar- 
ket-place, that  your  business  is  just  to  make  bombs  and 
drop  them  out  of  the  window?  You  smash  up  things 
just  the  same.  Why!  you'll  ruin  hundreds  and  thou- 
sands of  people,  people  living  on  rubber  shares,  people 
working  in  plantations,  old,  inadaptable  workers  in  rub- 
ber works.  . 


116     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

"I  believe  we  can  do  the  stuff  at  tenpence  a  pound/' 
said  Solomonson,  leaning  back  in  his  chair  at  last.  .  .  . 
"So  soon.,  that  is,  as  we  deal  in  quantity.  Tenpence ! 
We  can  lower  the  price  and  spread  the  market,  sixpence 
by  sixpence.  In  the  end — there  won't  be  any  more  plan- 
tations. Have  to  grow  tea." 

There  we  have  Eve  and  the  apple  brought 
up  to  date,  sin  being  the  choice  of  a  private  and 
individual  good  at  the  expense  of  the  general 
good.  The  honor  of  a  doctor  or  a  scientist  con- 
sists in  not  concealing  and  monopolizing  dis- 
coveries. But  why  should  the  line  be  drawn  at 
doctors  and  scientists?  There  is  the  crux  of 
socialist  ethics. 

By  this  type  of  compromise  the  actual  New 
Republicans  fall  short  of  their  Utopian  selves, 
the  Samurai.  But  compromise  is  well  within 
the  philosophy  of  Wells.  "The  individual 
case,"  he  says  in  First  and  Last  Things,  "is 
almost  always  complicated  by  the  fact  that  the 
existing  social  and  economic  system  is  based 
upon  conditions  that  the  growing  collective  in- 
telligence condemns  as  unjust  and  undesirable, 
and  that  the  constructive  spirit  in  men  now 
seeks  to  supersede.  We  have  to  live  in  a  pro- 


HUMAN  NATURE  117 

visional  state  while  we  dream  of  and  work  for 
a  better  one."  And  elsewhere :  "All  socialists 
everywhere  are  like  expeditionary  soldiers  far 
ahead  of  the  main  advance.  The  organized 
State  that  should  own  and  administer  their 
possessions  for  the  general  good  has  not  ar- 
rived to  take  them  over ;  and  in  the  meanwhile 
they  must  act  like  its  anticipatory  agents  ac- 
cording to  their  lights  and  make  things  ready 
for  its  coming." 

But  if  the  New  Republican  is  justified  in 
compromising  himself  for  the  means  of  sub- 
sistence, how  much  more  in  the  matter  of  love ! 
"All  for  love,  and  the  world  well  lost"  might 
be  written  over  several  of  Wells's  novels.  But, 
in  reality,  is  the  world  lost  at  all  under  these 
conditions?  On  the  contrary,  it  is  gained,  and 
the  more  unconsciously  the  better,  in  babies. 
Love  belongs  to  the  future  and  the  species  with 
more  finality  than  the  greatest  constructive 
work  of  the  present,  and  the  heroines  of  Wells 
are  inordinately  fond  of  babies.  When  Schop- 
enhauer analyzed  the  metaphysics  of  love  he 
showed  that  natural  selection  is  a  quite  inevi- 
table thing  seeking  its  own.  In  Wells  love  is 


118     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

equally  irresistible  and  direct.  Whenever  it 
appears  in  his  books  it  makes  itself  unmistak- 
ably known,  and,  having  done  so,  it  cuts  its 
way  straight  to  its  consummation,  through 
every  obstacle  of  sentiment,  affection,  custom, 
and  conventionality.  It  is  as  ruthless  as  the 
Last  Judgment,  and  like  the  Last  Judgment 
it  occurs  only  once. 

Why  then  does  it  appear  promiscuous  ?  The 
answer  to  this  question  refers  one  back  to  the 
underlying  contention  of  Wells  that  there  are 
two  kinds  of  human  beings  and  two  corre- 
sponding ethics,  and  that  in  the  end  the  New 
Republican  who  has  become  aware  of  himself 
cannot  consort  with  the  Normal  Social  breed. 
But  in  actual  life  this  standard  becomes  en- 
tangled with  many  complexities.  Just  as,  in  a 
world  of  commercial  competition,  it  is  the  lot 
of  most  of  those  who  try  to  give  themselves 
whole-heartedly  to  disinterested  work  that  they 
place  themselves  at  such  a  disadvantage  as  ulti- 
mately to  have  to  make  a  choice  between  work 
and  love,  so  the  pressure  of  society  and  the 
quality  of  human  nature  itself  create  entangle- 
ments of  every  kind.  It  is  the  nature  of  life 


HUMAN  NATURE  119 

that  one  grows  only  gradually  to  the  secure 
sense  of  a  personal  aim,  and  that  meanwhile 
day  by  day  one  has  given  hostages  to  fortune. 
To  wake  up  and  find  oneself  suddenly  the  mas- 
ter of  a  purpose  is  without  doubt,  in  the  ma- 
jority of  cases,  to  find  oneself  mortgaged  be- 
yond hope  to  the  existing  fact.  The  writer 
who  sets  out  to  make  his  way  temporarily  and 
as  a  stepping-stone  by  journalism  finds  himself 
in  middle  age  with  ample  means  to  write  what 
he  wishes  to  write  only  to  find  also  that  he  has 
become  for  good  and  all — a  journalist!  And 
so  it  is  with  lovers.  Only  in  the  degree  to 
which  free  will  remains  a  perpetual  and  present 
faith  can  "love  and  fine  thinking"  remain 
themselves;  free  of  their  attachments,  free  of 
their  obligations,  and  mortgages,  and  uls- 
counts.  That  is  the  quality  of  a  decent  mar- 
riage, and  the  end  of  a  marriage  that  is  not 
decent. 

It  is  no  business  of  mine  to  justify  the  sex- 
ual ethics  of  Wells.  But  there  is  a  difference 
between  a  fact  and  an  intention,  and  what  I 
have  just  said  serves  to  explain  the  intention. 
Consider,  in  the  light  of  it,  a  few  of  his  char- 


120     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

acters,  both  in  and  out  of  marriage.  Ann 
Veronica  from  the  first  frankly  owns  that  she 
is  not  in  love  with  Manning,  but  every  kind  of 
social  hypnotism  is  brought  into  motion  to  work 
on  her  ignorance  of  life  and  to  confuse  her 
sense  of  free-will.  George  Ponderevo  simply 
outgrows  Marion;  but  you  cannot  expect  him 
not  to  grow,  and  who  is  responsible  for  the 
limited,  furtive,  second-hand  world  in  which 
Marion  has  lived  and  which  has  irrev- 
ocably moulded  her?  Margaret's  world,  too, 
is  a  second-hand  world,  though  on  a  socially 
higher  plane :  she  lives  in  a  pale  dream  of  phil- 
anthropy and  Italian  art,  shocked  beyond  any 
mutual  understanding  by  everything  that  real- 
ly belongs  in  the  first-hand  world  of  her  hus- 
band. These  characters  meet  and  pass  one  an- 
other like  moving  scales;  they  never  stand  on 
quite  the  same  plane.  And  then  the  inevitable 
always  occurs.  For,  just  as  the  Children  of 
the  Food  cannot  consort  with  the  little  folk 
they  promise  to  supersede,  so  it  appears  to  be 
a  fixed  part  of  the  programme  of  Wells  that 
New  Republicans  can  only  love  other  New  Re- 
publicans with  success. 


HUMAN  NATURE  121 

He  implies  this  indeed  in  A  Modern  Utopia: 

"A  man  under  the  Rule  who  loves  a  woman  who 
does  not  follow  it,  must  either  leave  the  Samurai  to 
marry  her,  or  induce  her  to  accept  what  is  called  the 
Woman's  Rule,  which,  while  it  exempts  her  from  the 
severer  qualifications  and  disciplines,  brings  her  regi- 
men into  a  working  harmony  with  his." 

"Suppose  she  breaks  the  Rule  afterwards?" 
"He  must  leave  either  her  or  the  order." 
"There  is  matter  for  a  novel  or  so  in  that." 
"There  has  been  matter  for  hundreds." 


Wells  has  written  six  himself.  Love  and 
Mr.  Lewisham,  Ann  Veronica,  Tono-Bungay, 
The  New  Machiavelli,  Marriage,  The  Pas- 
sionate 'Friends,  are  all  variations  on  this 
theme.  In  one  of  these  alone  life's  double  mo- 
tive succeeds  in  establishing  itself,  and  it  is  for 
this  reason  that  Marriage,  to  my  thinking  the 
weakest  of  his  novels  from  an  artistic  point  of 
view,  is  the  most  important  concrete  presenta- 
tion of  the  philosophy  of  Wells.  It  is  an  in- 
ferior book,  but  it  gives  one  the  sense  of  a 
problem  solved.  By  passing  through  a  neces- 
sary yet  feasible  discipline,  Trafford  and  Mar- 
jorie  bridge  over  the  gap  between  haphazard 


122     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

human  nature  and  the  better  nature  of  social- 
ism, and  become  Samurai  in  fact. 

These  entanglements  of  the  actual  world 
would  be  an  overwhelming  obstacle  to  a  so- 
cialism less  vigorous  than  that  of  Wells.  But 
obstacles  give  edge  to  things,  and  for  a  man 
who  loves  order  no  one  could  have  pictured  dis- 
order with  more  relish  than  he.  Only  a  pure 
theorist  could  regret  the  artistic  zest  with 
which  he  portrays  our  muddled  world.  Run- 
ning amuck  was  a  constant  theme  in  his  early 
writings ;  his  comets  ran  amuck,  and  so  did  Mr. 
Bessel,  and  there  is  no  more  relished  wanton 
scene  than  that  of  the  Invisible  Man  running 
amuck  through  the  Surrey  villages.  Inten- 
tionally or  not,  this  relish  in  disorder  reinforces 
the  prime  fact  about  his  view  of  order.  He  ab- 
hors the  kind  of  order  which  is  often  ignorant- 
ly  confounded  with  the  socialist  aim,  the  order 
which  classifies  and  standardizes.  He  desires 
a  collective  consciousness  only  through  the  ex- 
ercise of  a  universally  unimpeded  free  will, 
and  he  would  rather  have  no  collectiveness  at 
all  than  one  that  implies  the  sacrifice  of  this 
free  will.  He  wishes  to  work  only  on  the  most 


HUMAN  NATURE  123 

genuine  human  stuff.  This  was  the  basis  of 
his  break  with  the  Fabian  Society;  it  is  the  ba- 
sis of  his  dislike  of  bureaucratic  methods  which 
deprive  people  of  beer  when  they  want  beer. 
It  defines  his  notion  of  the  true  method  of  so- 
cialism as  first  of  all  an  education  of  the  hu- 
man will  toward  voluntary  right  discipline. 

His  appeal,  then,  is  a  personal  one.  He  has 
proved  this  indeed  by  his  repudiation  of  all  at- 
tempts to  embody  in  practice  his  proposed  or- 
der of  voluntary  nobility,  the  Samurai.  Cer- 
tain groups  of  young  people  actually  organ- 
ized themselves  upon  the  Rule  that  he  had  out- 
lined, and  it  was  this  that  led  him  to  see  how 
entirely  his  ideal  had  been  personal  and  artistic 
rather  than  practical.  Anyone  at  all  familiar 
with  religious  history  and  psychology  will  see 
how  inevitably  any  such  group  would  tend  to 
emphasize  the  Rule  and  the  organization  rather 
than  the  socially  constructive  spirit  for  which 
the  whole  was  framed,  and  how  the  organiza- 
tion would  itself  separate  from  the  collective 
life  of  the  world  and  become  a  new  sect  among 
the  many  sects.  It  was  the  same  instinct  that 
led  Emerson,  Transcendental  communist  as 


124     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

he  was,  to  look  askance  at  Brook  Farm.  It  has 
been  the  want  of  an  equal  tact  in  eminent  re- 
ligious minds  that  has  made  society  a  warfare 
of  sect  and  opinion. 

When  one  tries  to  focus  the  nature  of  his  ap- 
peal one  recalls  a  passage  in  one  of  his  books 
where  he  sums  up  the  ordinary  mind  of  the 
world  and  the  function  which  all  socialism 
bears  to  this  mind: 

It  is  like  a  very  distended  human  mind;  it  is  without 
a  clear  aim;  it  does  not  know  except  in  the  very  vaguest 
terms  what  it  wants  to  do;  it  has  impulses,  it  has  fan- 
cies; it  begins  and  forgets.  In  addition,  it  is  afflicted 
with  a  division  within  itself  that  is  strictly  analogous  to 
that  strange  mental  disorder  which  is  known  to  psy- 
chologists as  multiple  personality.  It  has  no  clear  con- 
ception of  the  whole  of  itself,  it  goes  about  forgetting 
its  proper  name  and  address.  Part  of  it  thinks  of  itself 
as  one  great  thing,  as,  let  us  say,  Germany;  another 
thinks  of  itself  as  Catholicism,  another  as  the  white 
race,  or  Judaea.  At  times  one  might  deem  the  whole 
confusion  not  so  much  a  mind  as  incurable  dementia — 
a  chaos  of  mental  elements,  haunted  by  invincible  and 
mutually  incoherent  fixed  ideas.  ...  In  its  essence 
the  socialistic  movement  amounts  to  this :  it  is  an  attempt 
in  this  warring  chaos  of  a  collective  mind  to  pull  itself 
together,  to  develop  and  establish  a  governing  idea  of 


HUMAN  NATURE  125 

itself.     It  is  the  development  of  the  collective  self-con- 
sciousness of  humanity. 

Certainly  the  road  to  this  can  only  be 
through  a  common  understanding.  The  will- 
ing and  unwilling  servitudes  of  men,  the  insti- 
tutions of  society  that  place  love  and  work  in 
opposition  to  one  another,  the  shibboleths  of 
party,  the  aggressive  jingoisms  of  separate 
peoples,  the  immemorial  conspiracy  by  which 
men  have  upheld  the  existing  fact,  these  things 
do  spring  from  the  want  of  imagination,  the 
want  of  energetic  faith,  the  want  of  mutual  un- 
derstanding. To  this  inner  and  personal  prob- 
lem Wells  has  applied  himself.  Can  life  be 
ventilated,  can  the  mass  of  men  be  awakened  to 
a  sense  of  those  laws  of  social  gravitation  and 
the  transmutation  of  energy  by  which  life  is 
proved  a  myriad-minded  organism,  can  the 
ever-growing  sum  of  human  experience  and 
discovery  clear  up  the  dark  places  within  so- 
ciety and  within  man?  Among  those  who  have 
set  themselves  to  the  secular  solution  of  these 
questions — and  I  am  aware  of  the  limits  of 
any  secular  solution — there  are  few  as  effective 
as  Wells. 


126     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Consider  him  in  relation  to  a  single  concrete 
issue,  the  issue  of  militarism: 

Expenditure  upon  preparation  for  war  falls,  rough- 
ly, into  two  classes:  there  is  expenditure  upon  things 
that  have  a  diminishing  value,  things  that  grow  old- 
fashioned  and  wear  out,  such  as  fortifications,  ships, 
guns,  and  ammunition,  and  expenditure  upon  things  that 
have  a  permanent  and  even  growing  value,  such  as  or- 
ganized technical  research,  military  and  naval  experi- 
ment, and  the  education  and  increase  of  a  highly  trained 
class  of  war  experts. 

And  in  The  Common  Sense  of  Warfare  he 
urges  a  lavish  expenditure  on  "education  and 
training,  upon  laboratories  and  experimental 
stations,  upon  chemical  and  physical  research 
and  all  that  makes  knowledge  and  leading." 
Separate  the  principle  involved  here  from 
the  issue  it  is  involved  in,  get  the  intention 
clear  of  the  fact,  and  you  find  that  he  is 
saying  just  the  better  sort  of  things  that 
Matthew  Arnold  said.  Militarism  granted, 
are  you  going  to  do  military  things  or 
are  you  going  to  make  military  things  a 
stepping-stone  toward  the  clarification  of 
thought,  the  training  of  men,  the  develop- 


HUMAN  NATURE  127 

ment  of  race-imagination?  Militarism  has 
been  to  a  large  extent  the  impetus  that  has 
made  the  Germans  and  the  Japanese  the 
trained,  synthetic  peoples  they  are.  And  these 
very  qualities  are  themselves  in  the  end  hostile 
to  militarism.  Militarism  considered  in  this 
sense  is  precisely  what  the  General  Strike  is  in 
the  idea  of  M.  Georges  Sorel :  a  myth,  a  thing 
that  never  comes  to  pass,  but  which  trains  the 
general  will  by  presenting  it  with  a  concrete 
image  toward  which  the  will  readily  directs  it- 
self. Kipling,  in  the  eyes  of  the  New  Machia- 
velli,  at  least  made  the  nation  aware  of  what 
comes 

All  along  o'  dirtiness,  all  along  o'  mess, 

All  along  o'  doing  things  rather  more  or  less. 

There  is  in  this  no  defence  of  militarism. 
Granting  the  facts  of  society,  there  is  a  way 
that  accepts  and  secures  them  as  they  are  and 
another  way  of  turning  them  into  the  service 
of  the  future,  and  a  people  that  has  trained 
itself  with  reference  to  a  particular  issue  has 
virtually  trained  itself  for  all  issues. 

But  no  one,  I  think,  has  measured  the  diffi- 


128     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

culties  of  real  progress  more  keenly  than  Wells 
has  come  to  measure  them.  The  further  he  has 
penetrated  into  human  nature  the  more  alive 
he  has  become  to  these  difficulties.  The  New 
MacTiiavelli  is  a  modern  Rasselas  that  has  no 
happy  valley  in  the  end,  and  Remington 
passes  from  party  to  party,  penetrating  in- 
ward from  ideas  to  the  better  stuff  of  man- 
kind, hoping  to  embody  his  "white  passion  of 
statecraft,"  and  in  the  end  demonstrating  to 
himself  the  futility  of  all  groups  and  parties 
alike. 

And  as  with  parties,  so  with  men.  Consid- 
er that  scene  in  The  Passionate  Friends  where 
Stratton  tries  to  explain  in  writing  to  his 
father  what  he  has  been  experiencing  and  why 
he  must  go  away.  He  writes  page  after  page 
without  expressing  himself  and  at  last,  certain 
that  he  and  his  father  cannot  come  into  touch, 
sends  off  a  perfunctory  note  and  receives  a 
perfunctory  reply.  "There  are  times,"  he 
adds,  "when  the  inexpressiveness  of  life  comes 
near  to  overwhelming  me,  when  it  seems  to  me 
we  are  all  asleep  or  entranced,  and  but  a  little 
way  above  the  still  cows  who  stand  munching 


HUMAN  NATURE  129 

slowly  in  a  field.  .  .  .  Why  couldn't  we  and 
why  didn't  we  talk  together!" 

That  is  the  burden  of  his  latest  novel.  By 
this  touchstone  he  has  come  to  measure  the 
possibility  of  that  openness  of  mind,  that  mu- 
tual understanding,  that  ventilation  of  life 
and  thought  through  which  alone  the  Great 
State  can  exist. 


CHAPTER  VI 

A  PERSONAL   CHAPTER 

I  DOUBT  if  there  are  many  living  men  of 
note  who,  a  generation  after  they  are 
dead,  will  be  so  fully  and  easily  "explained"  as 
H.  G.  Wells.  He  is  a  most  personal  and 
transparent  writer,  he  is  the  effect  of  condi- 
tions and  forces  which  have  existed  for  scarcely 
more  than  two  generations.  But  for  these  very 
reasons  it  is  very  difficult  to  see  him  in  per- 
spective, and  to  explain  him  would  be  to  ex- 
plain the  age  in  which  we  live.  Let  me  at  least 
give  certain  facts  and  reflections  about  his  life 
written  by  Wells  himself,  a  few  years  ago,  in 
the  introduction  to  a  Russian  translation  of  his 
writings: 

I  was  born  *  in  that  queer  indefinite  class  that  we 
call  in  England  the  middle  class.  I  am  not  a  bit  aris- 
tocratic; I  do  not  know  any  of  my  ancestors  beyond 

*September  21,  1866. 

130 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      131 

my  grandparents,  and  about  them  I  do  not  know  very 
much,  because  I  am  the  youngest  son  of  my  father  and 
mother  and  their  parents  were  all  dead  before  I  was 
born.  My  mother  was  the  daughter  of  an  innkeeper  at 
a  place  called  Midhurst,  who  supplied  post-horses  to 
the  coaches  before  the  railways  came;  my  father  was 
the  son  of  the  head  gardener  of  Lord  de  Lisle  at  Pens- 
hurst  Castle,  in  Kent.  They  had  various  changes  of  for- 
tune and  position;  for  most  of  his  life  my  father  kept  a 
little  shop  in  a  suburb  of  London,  and  eked  out  his 
resources  by  playing  a  game  called  cricket,  which  is 
not  only  a  pastime,  but  a  show  which  people  will  pay 
to  see,  and  which,  therefore,  affords  a  living  to  profes- 
sional players.  His  shop  was  unsuccessful,  and  my 
mother,  who  had  been  a  lady's  maid,  became,  when  I 
was  twelve  years  old,  housekeeper  in  a  large  country 
house.  I  too  was  destined  to  be  a  shopkeeper.  I  left 
school  at  thirteen  for  that  purpose.  I  was  apprenticed 
first  to  a  chemist,  and,  that  proving  unsatisfactory,  to  a 
draper.  But  after  a  year  or  so  it  became  evident  to  me 
that  the  facilities  that  were  and  still  are  increasing  in 
England  offered  me  better  chances  in  life  than  a  shop 
and  comparative  illiteracy  could  do;  and  so  I  struggled 
for  and  got  various  grants  and  scholarships  that  enabled 
me  to  study  and  take  a  degree  in  science  and  some  medi- 
ocre honors  in  the  new  and  now  great  and  growing 
University  of  London.  .  .  .  After  I  had  graduated  I 
taught  biology  for  two  or  three  years,  and  then  became 
a  journalist.  ...  I  began  first  to  write  literary  ar- 
ticles, criticisms,  and  so  forth,  and  presently  short  imag- 


132     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

inative  stories  in  which  I  made  use  of  the  teeming  sug- 
gestions of  modern  science.   .    .    . 

So  much  for  the  facts.  The  reflections  are 
not  less  illuminating: 

The  literary  life  is  one  of  the  modern  forms  of  adven- 
ture. Success  with  a  book — even  such  a  commercially 
modest  success  as  mine  has  been — means  in  the  English- 
speaking  world  not  merely  a  moderate  financial  inde- 
pendence, but  the  utmost  freedom  of  movement  and  in- 
tercourse. A  poor  man  is  lifted  out  of  his  narrow  cir- 
cumstances into  familiar  and  unrestrained  intercourse 
with  a  great  variety  of  people.  He  sees  the  world;  if 
his  work  excites  interest,  he  meets  philosophers,  scien- 
tific men,  soldiers,  artists,  professional  men,  politicians 
of  all  sorts,  the  rich,  the  great,  and  he  may  make  such 
use  of  them  as  he  can.  He  finds  himself  no  longer  read- 
ing in  books  and  papers,  but  hearing  and  touching  at 
first  hand  the  big  questions  that  sway  men,  the  initia- 
tives that  shape  human  affairs.  .  .  .  To  be  a  literary 
artist  is  to  want  to  render  one's  impressions  of  the  things 
about  one.  Life  has  interested  me  enormously  and  filled 
me  with  ideas  and  associations  I  want  to  present  again. 
I  have  liked  life  and  like  it  more  and  more.  The  days 
in  the  shop  and  the  servants'  hall,  the  straitened  strug- 
gles of  my  early  manhood,  have  stored  me  with  vivid 
memories  that  illuminate  and  help  me  to  appreciate  all 
the  wider  vistas  of  my  later  social  experiences.  I  have 
friends  and  intimates  now  at  almost  every  social  level, 
from  that  of  a  peer  to  that  of  a  pauper,  and  I  find  my 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      133 

sympathies  and  curiosities  stretching  like  a  thin  spider's 
web  from  top  to  bottom  of  the  social  tangle.  I  count 
that  wide  social  range  one  of  the  most  fortunate  acci- 
dents of  my  life,  and  another  is  that  I  am  of  a  diffident 
and  ineffectual  presence,  unpunctual,  fitful,  and  easily 
bored  by  other  than  literary  effort;  so  that  I  am  not 
tempted  to  cut  a  figure  in  the  world  and  abandon  that 
work  of  observing  and  writing  which  is  my  proper  busi- 
ness in  it. 

This  candid  and  exact  statement  enables  us 
to  see  just  how  far,  in  matters  of  fact,  experi- 
ence and  belief,  the  autobiographical  motive 
has  entered  his  writings.  It  would  be  possible 
to  show  how  inevitably  such  an  ideal  as  that  of 
the  New  Republican  Samurai  arose  from  such 
a  life ;  how  much  that  conscious  and  deliberate 
insistence  on  personal  efficiency  and  orderly 
ways,  that  repudiation  of  mental  confusion,, 
sluggishness,  and  sentiment  may  figure  as  a 
kind  of  stepping-stone  from  the  world  of 
Kipps  and  Polly  to  the  world  of  Remington 
and  Trafford;  how  a  self -wrought  scientific 
education  would  form  the  basis  of  an  ideal  of 
aristocracy  rising  from  it;  and  how  the  motto 
"There  is  no  Being  but  Becoming"  would  ex- 
press its  own  constant  desertion  of  levels 


134     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

achieved,  its  own  pressing  upward  to  levels 
equally  transient.  Just  as  the  "democratic 
person"  of  Whitman  raises  his  own  fervent, 
chaotic,  and  standardless  experience  into  an 
ideal,  so  also  the  ideal  of  Wells  is  nothing  else 
than  the  projection  of  his  own  experimental 
opportunism.  It  is  impossible  in  discussing 
Wells  to  ignore  this  social  ascent;  for  in  Eng- 
land a  man  passes  from  one  stratum  to  another 
only  by  virtue  of  a  certain  lack  of  substantial- 
ity, a  power  to  disencumber  himself,  to  shed 
customs  and  affections  and  all  the  densenesses 
and  coagulations  which  mark  each  grade  in 
that  closely  defined  social  hierarchy.  The 
world  of  shopkeeping  in  England  is  a  world 
girt  about  with  immemorial  subjections;  it  is, 
one  might  say,  a  moss-covered  world;  and  to 
shake  oneself  loose  from  it  is  to  become  a  roll- 
ing stone,  a  drifting  and  unsettled,  a  detached 
and  acutely  personal,  individual.  It  is  to  pass 
from  a  certain  confined  social  maturity,  a  con- 
fused mellowness,  into  a  world  wholly  adven- 
turous and  critical,  into  a  freedom  which 
achieves  itself  at  the  expense  of  solidity  and 
warmth.  In  Wells,  for  instance,  the  sense  of 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      135 

the  soil  is  wholly  supplanted  by  the  sense  of 
machinery.  His  evolution  has  been  the  reverse 
of  the  usual  evolution  from  what  Bacon  called 
the  lumen  siccum  to  the  lumen  humidum,  from 
the  dry  light  to  the  light  that  is  drenched  in 
customs  and  affections.  Instead  of  growing 
mellower,  he  has  grown  more  and  more  fluid 
and  electric,  in  direct  ratio  to  the  growing 
width  of  his  social  horizon. 

To  prove  this  one  has  only  to  consider  his 
novels.  There  was  a  time  when  he  had  in  com- 
mon with  Dickens  and  De  Foe  the  quality  they 
have  in  common  with  one  another — the  quality 
of  homeliness.  He  drew  the  little  world  he 
knew  well,  the  limited  and  lovable  world  of 
small  folk.  Mr.  Hoopdriver,  Delia  the  cham- 
bermaid, Kipps  and  Ann  Pornick — a  score  of 
these  helpless,  grown-up  little  children  he  pic- 
tured with  a  radiant  affection,  tempering  the 
wind  to  the  shorn  lamb.  It  is  more  in  the  na- 
ture of  his  later  thought  to  see  poverty  as  a 
wasteful  rather  than  a  cruel  thing,  even  though 
he  may  not  have  approached  the  harsh  realism 
of  Bernard  Shaw's  observation:  "I  have  never 
had  any  feeling  about  the  English  working 


136     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

classes  except  a  desire  to  abolish  them  and  re- 
place them  by  sensible  people." 

Certainly  he  has  not  experienced  any  other 
world  in  quite  this  way.  "I  count  that  wide 
social  range  one  of  the  most  fortunate  acci- 
dents in  my  life,"  he  says.  Accidental  one  feels 
it  to  be,  as  of  a  man  inhabiting  the  great  world 
by  virtue  of  sheer  talent,  whose  nature  has, not 
in  any  sense  settled  there.  His  philosophy  and 
his  socialism  are  outgrowths  of  his  own  experi- 
ence; they  erect  into  reasons  and  theories  the 
nature  of  a  life  which  is  not  at  home,  and  which 
easily  unburdens  itself  of  all  that  seems  insen- 
sate because  it  is  unfamiliar.  To  be  a  socialist  at 
all  is  to  have  accustomed  oneself,  through  ne- 
cessity or  imagination,  to  a  certain  detachment 
from  a  great  many  of  the  familiar,  lovable,  en- 
cumbering, delightful  stupidities  of  the  world. 
And  Wells  has  travelled  up  and  down  through 
time  and  space  too  much  to  have  any  great  re- 
gard for  the  present.  "I  have  come  to  be,  I 
am  afraid,"  he  says,  in  The  Future  in  America, 
"even  a  little  insensitive  to  fine  immediate 
things  through  this  anticipatory  habit.  .  .  . 
There  are  times  indeed  when  it  makes  life  seem 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      137 

so  transparent  and  flimsy,  seem  so  dissolving, 
so  passing  on  to  an  equally  transitory  series  of 

consequences ."  His  hold  upon  the  present 

is  so  far  from  inevitable  that  The  New  Machia- 
velU  and  Marriage,  realistic  as  they  are,  are 
represented  as  being  written  some  years  hence, 
our  own  time  already  appearing  retrospective- 
ly in  them.  As  little  as  Faust  has  he  been 
tempted  to  call  out  upon  the  passing  moment. 
His  main  characters  drift  through  this  period 
of  time,  substantial  themselves  but  with  a  back- 
ground of  ^substantialities,  in  a  way  that  re- 
calls Paolo  and  Francesca  looming  out  of  the 
phantom  cloud-procession  of  the  Inferno. 

Into  this  larger  world,  in  short,  he  has  car- 
ried with  him  only  himself  and  his  own  story. 
We  live  in  two  worlds — the  primary  world  of 
vivid  personal  realities  and  the  secondary  world 
of  our  human  background.  It  is  the  secondary 
world  that  anchors  us  in  time  and  space;  the 
primary  world  we  carry  with  us  as  part  of  our- 
selves. In  Wells  there  is  no  secondary  world, 
no  human  background,  no  sense  of  abiding  re- 
lations. It  is  his  philosophy  of  life  and  the 
quality  of  his  men  and  women  to  be  experi- 


138     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

mental  in  a  plastic  scheme.  His  range  is  very 
small:  the  same  figures  reappear  constantly. 
There  is  the  Wells  hero, — Lewisham,  Capes, 
Ponderevo,  Remington,  Trafford,  Stratton; 
there  is  the  Wells  heroine,  Ann  Veronica,  Isa- 
bel, Marjorie,  Lady  Mary;  there  is  the  ineffec- 
tual woman  with  whom  the  Wells  hero  be- 
comes entangled,  Capes's  first  wife,  Marion, 
Margaret;  there  is  the  ineffectual  man  with 
whom  the  Wells  heroine  becomes  entangled, 
Magnet,  Manning.  To  strike  the  lowest  com- 
mon denominator  in  this  tangle  is  inevitably  to 
arrive  once  more,  one  feels,  in  the  region  of 
personal  experience.  Although  it  cannot  be 
said  that  his  minor  characters  are  lacking  in 
reality,  they  are  certainly  intellectual  portraits, 
and  outside  the  limits  of  subjective  experience. 
The  principal  men  and  women  of  Wells  move 
through  a  world  seen,  but  hardly  a  world  felt. 
This  want  of  social  background  makes  his 
characters  as  detached  from  the  familiar  earth 
as  chessmen  are  detached  from  a  chessboard. 
They  never  seem  to  be,  like  most  men  and 
women  either  in  life  or  fiction,  like  the  Kipps 
and  Polly  of  his  own  earlier  fiction,  vegetable 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      139 

growths.  Heredity,  fatality,  the  soil  are  not 
mainly  operating  forces  with  them.  They  are 
creatures  of  intelligence  and  free  will,  freely 
and  intelligently  making  and  moulding  them- 
selves and  their  circumstances.  Human  na- 
ture in  Wells  is  very  largely  a  sheer  thing,  a 
thing  that  begins  with  itself,  answers  for  itself, 
lives  at  first  hand.  That  is  the  personal  qual- 
ity of  the  man  himself,  and  it  follows  that  the 
quality  is  wholly  convincing  only  where  what  I 
have  called  his  primary  world  is  concerned :  the 
rest  of  the  world  he  builds  up  by  intelligent  ob- 
servation and  the  literary  talent  of  creating  hu- 
man stuff  out  of  whole  cloth. 

In  this  he  is  well  served  by  his  antipathies. 
His  belief  in  personal  self -determinism  is  so 
strong  that  he  instinctively  sees  the  vegetative 
nature  of  the  ordinary  life  as  a  kind  of  moral 
slough,  a  state  of  being  detestably  without  ini- 
tiative, faith,  energy,  will.  And  consequently 
the  Normal  Social  Life  against  which  he  is  al- 
ways tilting  is  a  life  seen  by  him  with  all  the 
vividness  of  an  intense  personal  and  philosoph- 
ical animosity.  Consider,  for  example,  the  por- 
traits of  Mr.  Pope  and  Mr.  Stanley,  survivals 


140    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

in  a  sense  of  the  old  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley 
type,  with  all  the  sweetness  gone  out  of  it  and 
only  the  odious  qualities  left,  the  domineering, 
vain,  proprietary  qualities.  They  exist  mainly 
as  symbols  of  everything  that  enlightened  and 
right-minded  daughters  will  not  put  up  with; 
they  come  as  near  to  being  the  foils  of  right 
destiny  as  Wells  will  ever  allow;  they  sum  up 
everything  that  stands  in  the  way  of  man's 
free  will.  They  are  mercilessly  dealt  with,  and 
they  are  memorable  figures. 

Without  this  antipathy,  and  outside  his  own 
primary  world,  he  pretty  generally  fails.  One 
recalls,  for  example,  old  Mrs.  Traff ord  in  Mar- 
riage, evidently  intended  to  be  his  ideal  of  the 
enlightened  woman  grown  old.  She  is  a  pale, 
dimly  perfect,  automatically  wise  old  lady 
carved  out  of  wood.  Trafford  himself,  one 
feels,  is  a  chip  of  the  same  block.  Trafford 
obviously  is  not  Wells  himself,  as  Ponderevo 
and  Remington  are  Wells:  he  is  the  Utopian 
counterpart  of  these  persons,  at  least  in  the 
matter  that  concerns  Wells  most,  the  matter  of 
sex.  One  could  show  that,  aside  from  the  six 
or  eight  chief  characters  who  in  their  various 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      141 

ways  express  the  nature  and  experience  of 
Wells  himself,  he  succeeds  in  his  portraiture 
only  where  no  demand  is  made  on  his  sympa- 
thies. 

The  same  absence  of  social  background 
which  throws  into  relief  his  primary  world  of 
characters  throws  into  relief  also  the  primary 
facts  of  human  nature.  Trafford  and  Mar- 
jorie,  the  most  conventionally  placed  of  his 
characters,  pull  up  stakes,  leave  their  children, 
and  go  to  Labrador.  His  other  men  and  wom- 
en are  even  more  independent  of  the  social  net- 
work. Consequently  they  are  independent  of 
that  chain  of  relationships — friendship,  affec- 
tion, minor  obligations — which  mitigate,  sub- 
due, soften  the  primary  motives  of  most  peo- 
ple. They  are  almost  startlingly  physical. 
Their  instincts  are  as  sure  as  those  of  cavemen, 
and  their  conduct  as  direct.  They  are  as  clear 
about  the  essential  matter  of  love  as  ever  Scho- 
penhauer was,  or  Adam  and  Eve,  and  they 
stand  out  as  sharply  against  the  embarrass- 
ments and  secrecies  of  the  usual  world  as  a 
volcanic  rock  stands  out  against  a  tropical 
landscape.  In  this  without  doubt  they  exhibit 


142     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

the  fact  that  socialism  does  and  will  actually 
alter  human  nature,  and  that  in  the  instinctive 
socialist  human  nature  is  already  altered.  For 
socialism  inflexibly  militates  against  those 
more  sentimental  aspects  of  love,  love  of  coun- 
try as  such,  the  paternal  and  feudal  principles, 
love  of  property,  and  the  like,  which  belong 
properly  to  the  intelligence,  all  those  functions 
where  love,  in  a  majority  of  cases,  goes  wrong, 
blunders,  stultifies  growth,  confuses  the  public 
design  of  the  world.  As  a  result  it  throws  love 
into  relief,  emphasizes  the  nature  of  sex  and 
the  reason  d'etre  of  reproduction ;  makes  it,  to 
use  a  favorite  word  of  Wells,  stark. 

I  pause  at  this  word.  It  is  one  of  those  talis- 
manic  words  one  finds  perpetually  cropping  up 
in  the  writings  of  men  who  have  a  marked 
point  of  view,  words  that  express  deep  and 
abiding  preferences  and  often  set  the  key  of 
an  entire  philosophy.  "I  like  bare  things," 
says  George  Ponderevo,  in  Tono-Bungay; 
"stripped  things,  plain,  austere,  and  continent 
things,  fine  lines  and  cold  colors."  That  is  the 
gesture  of  an  artistic  mind  which  repudiates, 
with  an  impatient  sharpness,  all  the  entangle- 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      143 

ments  of  the  ordinary  world.  It  is  Oriental,  it 
is  Japanese,  it  is  anything  you  like ;  but  if  it  is 
English  also  it  marks  an  entirely  new  regime. 
Without  question  it  is  English,  and  American 
as  well.  Thousands  of  people  share  that  pref- 
erence, and  were  economic  socialism  to  go  by 
the  board  we  should  still  have  to  reckon  with 
the  progress  of  socialistic  human  nature.  It 
detaches  itself  each  day  a  little  more  from 
property,  locality,  and  the  hope  of  reward;  it 
ceases  to  be  necessitarian,  it  becomes  voluntary ; 
it  relegates  drudgery  to  mechanical  devices ;  it 
releases  the  individual  to  a  sense  of  his  own  co- 
operative and  contributory  place  in  the  scheme 
of  a  more  orderly  future.  Relatively  speak- 
ing, the  tendency  of  our  kind  is  all  away  from 
luxury,  sloth,  complacency,  confusion,  igno- 
rance, filth,  heat,  proprietorship,  and  all  in  the 
direction  of  light,  austerity,  agility,  intelli- 
gence, coolness,  athletic  energy,  understand- 
ing, cleanliness,  order,  "bare  things,  fine  lines, 
and  cold  colors." 

That  is  evident,  and  it  is  equally  evident  that 
the  personal  character  and  career  of  Wells  are 
emblematic  of  this  entire  tendency.  He  has 


144     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

unravelled  himself  by  science,  talent,  and  vigor 
out  of  "lower  middle  class"  Victorianism.  Is 
it  strange  that  he  has  adopted  as  a  kind  of 
sacred  image  that  light,  free,  and  charming 
product  of  our  decade,  the  aeroplane,  sprung 
as  it  is  out  of  the  wreckage,  out  of  the  secret 
beginnings,  the  confused  muscularities,  the  ef- 
fort and  smoke  of  the  most  chaotic  of  all  cen- 
turies, like  a  blade  of  exquisitely  tempered  and 
chased  steel  which  justifies  everything  that  was 
most  laborious  and  unsightly  in  the  forge? 

But  considered  as  a  sacred  image  the  aero- 
plane has  its  limitations.  So  also,  considered 
as  an  exponent  of  life,  has  Wells.  Philosophy 
and  religion,  as  he  presents  them,  are  simply 
what  he  chooses  to  think  and  feel,  what  he  has 
been  led  by  his  own  experience  to  think  and 
feel.  His  main  experience  has  been  the  experi- 
ence of  disentangling  himself,  and  therefore 
life,  reflected  from  within  himself,  is  to  him  a 
thing  also  which  disentangles  itself  and  grows 
ever  more  free,  simple,  and  lucid.  In  the  mind 
of  Wells  this  process  has  taken  on  an  alto- 
gether mystical,  transcendental  significance,  a 
religious  aspect.  Possible  as  that  is  to  himself 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      145 

personally,  how  far  can  it  be  taken  as  an  argu- 
ment to  the  human  soul?  How  does  it  qualify 
him  as  a  teacher,  a  public  voice,  a  thinker  for 
the  mass  of  men?  How  does  the  conception  of 
life  purely  as  a  process  relate  itself  to  human 
experience  ? 

Applied  to  history,  it  seems  to  fail.  Wells 
is  devoid  of  historical  imagination.  In  his  por- 
trait of  Margaret  in  The  New  Machiavelli  he 
has  properly,  though  somewhat  harshly,  repu- 
diated what  ordinarily  passes  for  culture.  But 
had  he  himself  possessed  the  reality  of  what 
seems  to  him  simply  "living  at  second  hand," 
he  would  never  have  been  led  to  refer  to  Leon- 
ardo, Michael  Angelo,  and  Diirer  as  "patheti- 
cally reaching  out,  as  it  were,  with  empty  de- 
sirous hands  toward  the  unborn  possibilities  of 
the  engineer."  That  is  a  very  interesting  and 
a  very  extraordinary  statement,  and  it  is  quite 
true  that  each  of  these  men  would  have  re- 
joiced in  the  engineering  possibilities  of  our 
time.  But  how  much  of  the  soul  of  Michael 
Angelo,  for  example,  was  involved  in  engi- 
neering? How  far  can  his  hands  be  said  to 
have  been  "empty"  for  the  want  of  scope  in 


146     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

engineering?  The  power  and  the  function  of 
Michael  Angelo  can  rightly  be  seen,  not  in  re- 
lation to  any  sort  of  social  or  mechanical  pro- 
cess, but  in  relation  to  things  that  are  perma- 
nent in  human  nature,  in  relation  to  just  those 
matters  included  in  the  admonition  of  Wells 
to  "reject  all  such  ideas  as  Right,  Liberty, 
Happiness,  Duty,  and  Beauty  and  hold  fast  to 
the  assertion  of  the  fundamental  nature  of  life 
as  a  tissue  and  succession  of  births."  Again, 
consider  a  somewhat  similar  reference  to  Mar- 
cus Aurelius,  of  which  the  gist  is  that  the  au- 
thor of  the  Meditations  was,  actually  in  conse- 
quence of  his  own  character,  the  father  of  one 
of  the  worst  rulers  the  world  has  known.  The 
implication  here  is  that  the  study  of  self-per- 
fection in  the  father  was  complementary  to,  if 
not  responsible  for,  the  social  impotence  and 
blindness  of  the  son.  Instead  of  dedicating 
himself  to  the  static  ideal  of  personal  char- 
acter, the  assumption  seems  to  be,  Marcus 
Aurelius  ought  to  have  lived  exclusively  in  his 
function  as  ruler  and  father.  He  studied  him- 
self, not  as  a  ruler  but  as  a  man,  and  the  social 
process  had  its  revenge  on  his  line.  To  Wells, 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      147 

in  a  word,  the  static  elements  of  character  and 
the  study  of  perfection  are  not  to  be  distin- 
guished from  vicious  self-consequence. 

Consider  also  a  recent  passage  in  which  he 
has  given  a  general  impression  of  literature: 

It  seems  to  me  more  and  more  as  I  live  longer  that 
most  poetry  and  most  literature  and  particularly  the  lit- 
erature of  the  past  is  discordant  with  the  vastness  and 
variety,  the  reserves  and  resources  and  recuperations 
of  life  as  we  live  it  to-day.  It  is  the  expression  of  life 
under  cruder  and  more  rigid  conditions  than  ours,  lived 
by  people  who  loved  and  hated  more  naively,  aged 
sooner,  and  died  younger  than  we  do.  Solitary  persons 
and  single  events  dominated  them  as  they  do  not  domi- 
nate us. 

To  appreciate  this  meditation  one  has  to  re- 
member the  character  and  career  which  led  to 
the  writing  of  it.  But  so  far  as  we  others  are 
concerned,  how  far  can  the  assumption  it  rests 
upon  be  considered  valid,  the  assumption  of  a 
process  that  sweeps  men  on  and  leads  human 
nature,  as  it  were,  progressively  to  shed  itself? 
Dr.  Johnson,  for  example,  was  a  man  the  con- 
ditions of  whose  life  were  crude  and  rigid  in 
the  extreme,  a  man  singularly  dominated  by 


148     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

solitary  persons  and  single  events,  but  is  his 
conversation  discordant  with  the  variety,  the 
"reserves,  resources,  and  recuperations  of  life 
as  we  live  it  to-day"?  I  can  well  understand 
this  feeling.  To  pass  directly  from  the  thin, 
tentative,  exhilarating,  expansive  air  of  our 
own  time  into  the  presence  of  that  funny, 
stuffy,  cocksure,  pompous  old  man  is  to  re- 
ceive a  preposterous  shock.  But  having  come 
to  laugh,  one  stops  with  a  very  different  sensa- 
tion. The  depths  of  personality  and  wisdom 
that  exist  there  take  on  a  disconcerting  signifi- 
cance in  "relation  to  contemporary  pragmatism. 
The  mass  of  men  veer  ahout;  far-separated 
epochs  have  their  elective  affinities,  and  if  any- 
thing about  the  future  is  plain  it  is  that  this, 
that,  and  the  other  generation  will  find  in  Dr. 
Johnson  a  strangely  premature  contemporary. 
Wells  has  himself  admitted  this  principle. 
To  Plutarch,  Rabelais,  Machiavelli  he  has  paid 
his  tribute.  Hear  what  George  Ponderevo  has 
to  say  about  Plutarch  in  his  recollections  of 
Bladesover  House : 

I  found  Langhorne's  Plutarch  too,  I   remember,  on 
those  shelves.     It  seems  queer  to  me  now  to  think  that 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      149 

I  acquired  pride  and  self-respect,  the  idea  of  a  state 
and  the  germ  of  public  spirit,  in  such  a  furtive  fashion; 
queer,  too,  that  it  should  rest  with  an  old  Greek,  dead 
these  eighteen  hundred  years,  to  teach  me  that. 

Considering  what  part  the  notion  of  a  state 
plays  in  his  range  of  ideas,  that  is  a  remarkable 
confession.  But  why  stop  with  statecraft? 
The  human  mind  could  not,  in  all  epochs,  have 
established  permanent  ideals  of  statecraft  with- 
out permanent  ideals  of  a  more  strictly  per- 
sonal kind. 

The  truth  is  that  Wells,  for  all  that  he  has 
passed  outside  the  economics  of  socialism,  is 
really  bounded  by  the  circle  of  ideas  which  pro- 
duced them.  The  typical  Marxian,  the  concen- 
trated Marxian,  will  tell  you  that  life  is 
summed  up  in  the  theory  of  value,  and  that  the 
only  true  thing  is  economic  determinism. 
Measuring  all  thought  by  that  criterion,  he 
finds  Dante  and  Shakespeare  unintelligible 
and  offensive  gibberish,  and  will  scent  the  trail 
of  the  capitalist  in  Grimm's  Fairy  Tales.  That 
is  the  crude  form  in  which  exclusive  socialism 
presents  itself.  To  say  that  "the  fundamental 
nature  of  life  is  a  tissue  and  succession  of 


150     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

births"  is  merely  a  refinement  of  this.  It  is 
true,  just  as  the  economic  determinism  of  Marx 
on  the  whole  is  true.  But  the  world  is  full  of 
a  number  of  things ;  or  rather  it  is  the  business 
of  a  reasonable  mind  to  see  it  in  a  number  of 
ways  at  once.  Because  there  is  a  Will  to  Live 
and  a  Will  to  Power,  because  things  grow  and 
continue  to  grow,  that  does  not  explain  love, 
or  pain,  or  friendship,  or  music,  or  poetry,  or 
indeed  life.  Life  is  a  tangle,  a  tangle  which 
every  socialist  must  feel  to  be  disentangling  it- 
self;  but  it  is  also  a  riddle,  and  on  that  point 
socialism  has  nothing  to  say  at  all. 

It  is  in  presenting  life  wholly  as  a  tangle 
and  not  at  all  as  a  riddle  that  the  philosophy 
and  religion  of  Wells  appear  so  inadequate. 
Could  Wells  write  a  poem?  one  asks  oneself, 
and  the  question  is  full  of  meaning.  There  is 
nothing  to  suggest  that  at  any  moment  of  his 
life  he  has  felt  this  impulse,  which  has  been  the 
normal  thing  in  English  authors.  "Modern 
poetry,  with  an  exception  or  so,"  he  remarks 
somewhere,  and  for  all  his  writings  reveal  of 
him  he  might  have  said  poetry  as  a  whole,  "does 
not  signify  at  all."  It  is  the  same  with  regard 


A  PERSONAL  CHAPTER      151 

to  music,  art,  external  nature.  He  is  not  want- 
ing in  the  plastic  sense:  his  writings  are  filled 
with  picturesque  groupings,  figures  cut  in  out- 
line against  a  sunset,  masses  of  machinery  in 
the  glare  of  the  forge,  things  that  suggest  the 
etcher's  eye.  But  they  are  curiously  imper- 
sonal. Consider,  for  example,  his  description 
of  Worms  Cathedral: 

It  rises  over  this  green  and  flowery  peace,  a  towering, 
lithe,  light  brown,  sunlit,  easy  thing,  as  unconsciously 
and  irrelevantly  splendid  as  a  tall  ship  in  the  evening 
glow  under  a  press  of  canvas. 

You  cannot  doubt  that  he  has  felt  a  beauty 
in  this,  but  the  beauty  he  feels  is  essentially 
the  beauty  of  a  piece  of  engineering;  he  is  as 
untouched  by  the  strictly  personal  artistic  and 
religious  qualities  of  this  building,  not  to  men- 
tion its  connection  with  human  history,  as  if  he 
had  seen  it  through  a  telescope  from  another 
planet.  It  is  not  the  changeless  riddle  and  par- 
tial solution  of  life  for  which  this  building 
stands  that  stir  in  Wells  the  sense  of  beauty 
and  meaning:  it  is  the  mechanism,  the  process 
— his  emotions  gather  about  the  physical  result 
which  appears  to  justify  these. 


152    THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

A  chacun  son  infini. 

There  will  always  be  some  to  whom  the  sig- 
nificance of  things,  the  meaning  of  any  given 
present  will  seem  to  evaporate  in  this  concep- 
tion of  mankind  as  "permanently  in  tran- 
sition." Reading  those  passages  where  Wells 
has  expressed  the  meaning  life  has  for 
him,  I  feel  much  as  I  should  feel  with  regard 
to  music  if  I  heard  a  mass  of  Mozart  played  at 
the  rate  of  sixty  beats  a  second,  or,  with  regard 
to  painting,  if  a  procession  of  Rembrandts 
were  moved  rapidly  across  my  field  of  vision. 
The  music  as  a  whole  is  a  tissue  and  succession 
of  sounds,  the  pictures  as  a  whole  are  a  tissue 
and  succession  of  colors.  But  that  is  not  mu- 
sic, that  is  not  art.  Nor  is  a  tissue  and  succes- 
sion of  births  life. 

But  indeed  nothing  is  easier  than  to  reduce 
Wells  to  an  absurdity.  If  he  implies  anything 
at  all  he  implies  a  "transvaluation  of  all 
values."  It  remains  to  consider  him  from  this 
point  of  view. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS 

IN  order  to  understand  Wells  at  all  one  must 
grasp  the  fact  that  he  belongs  to  a  type 
of  mind  which  has  long  existed  in  European 
literature  but  which  is  comparatively  new  in 
the  English-speaking  world,  the  type  of  mind 
of  the  so-called  "intellectual."  He  is  an  "in- 
tellectual" rather  than  an  artist;  that  is  to  say, 
he  naturally  grasps  and  interprets  life  in  the 
light  of  ideas  rather  than  in  the  light  of  ex- 
perience. 

To  pass  from  a  definition  to  an  example,  let 
me  compare  Wells  in  this  respect  with  the 
greatest  and  most  typical  figure  of  the  opposite 
camp  in  contemporary  English  fiction ;  I  mean 
Joseph  Conrad.  This  comparison  is  all  the 
more  apt  because  just  as  much  as  Wells  Con- 
rad typifies  the  spirit  of  "unrest"  (a  word  he 
has  almost  made  his  own,  so  often  does  he  use 
it)  which  is  the  note  of  our  age.  Both  of  these 

153 


154     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

novelists  have  endeavored  to  express  the  spirit 
of  unrest ;  both  have  suggested  a  way  of  mak- 
ing it  contributory  to  the  attainment  of  an 
ideal.  But  how  diff erent  is  their  method,  how 
different  is  their  ideal!  And  roughly  the  dif- 
ference is  this:  that  to  Conrad  the  spirit  of 
unrest  is  a  personal  mood,  a  thing,  as  people 
used  to  say,  between  man  and  his  Maker; 
whereas  to  Wells  the  spirit  of  unrest  is  not  a 
mood  but  a  rationally  explicable  frame  of 
mind,  a  sense  of  restricted  function,  an  issue  to 
be  fought  out  not  between  man  and  nature  but 
between  man  and  society.  In  other  words, 
where  Conrad's  point  of  view  is  moral,  Wells's 
point  of  view  is  social ;  and  whereas  in  Conrad 
the  spirit  of  unrest  can  only  be  appeased  by 
holding  fast  to  certain  simple  instinctive  moral 
principles,  integrity,  honor,  loyalty,  etc.,  con- 
tributing in  this  way  to  the  ideal  of  personal 
character,  the  spirit  of  unrest  in  Wells  is  to  be 
appeased  by  working  through  the  established 
fact,  by  altering  the  environment  in  which  man 
lives,  contributing  in  this  way  to  the  ideal  of  a 
great  society  of  which  personal  character  is  at 
once  the  essence  and  the  product. 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      155 

In  the  end,  of  course,  both  these  views  of  life 
come  to  the  same  thing,  for  you  cannot  have  a 
great  society  which  is  not  composed  of  greatly 
living  individuals,  or  vice  versa.  But  practi- 
cally there  is  a  world  of  difference  between 
them,  according  as  any  given  mind  emphasizes 
the  one  or  the  other.  This  difference,  I  say,  is 
the  difference  between  life  approached  through 
experience  and  life  approached  through  ideas. 
And  when  we  penetrate  behind  these  points  of 
view  we  find  that  they  are  determined  very 
largely  by  the  characters  and  modes  of  living 
of  the  men  who  hold  them.  That  explains  the 
vital  importance  in  literary  criticism  of  know- 
ing something  about  the  man  one  is  discussing, 
as  distinguished  from  the  work  of  his  brain 
pure  and  simple.  There  is  a  reason  why  the 
intellectualist  point  of  view  occurs  as  a  rule  in 
men  who  have  habitually  lived  the  delocalized, 
detached,  and  comparatively  depersonalized 
life  of  cities,  while  men  of  the  soil,  of  the  sea, 
of  the  elements,  men,  so  to  speak,  of  intensive 
experience,  novelists  like  Conrad  or  Tolstoy 
or  Hardy,  are  fundamentally  non-intellectual, 
pessimistic,  and  moral. 


156     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

And  this  explains  the  natural  opposition  be- 
tween Conrad  and  Wells.  Aside  from  the 
original  bent  of  his  mind,  the  intensive  quality 
of  Conrad's  experience — an  experience  of  ships 
and  the  minute,  simple,  personal,  tragic  life  of 
ships,  set  off  against  the  impersonal,  appalling 
sea  and  an  always  indifferent  universe,  a  life 
remote  from  change,  in  which  the  relations  of 
things  are  in  a  peculiar  sense  abiding  and  in 
which  only  one  problem  exists,  the  problem  of 
character,  imminent  nature  being  kept  at  bay 
only  through  the  loyalty,  integrity  and  grit  of 
men — the  intensive  quality  of  this  experience, 
I  say,  acting  upon  an  artistic  mind,  would  nat- 
urally tend  to  produce  not  only  a  bitterly  pro- 
found wisdom,  but  an  equally  profound  con- 
tempt for  the  play  of  ideas,  so  irresponsible  in 
comparison,  and  for  a  view  of  the  world  based 
upon  ideas  the  real  cost  of  which  has  never 
been  counted  in  the  face  of  hunger,  icy  winds, 
storm  and  shipwreck,  and  the  abysmal  forces 
of  nature.  Men  who  go  down  to  the  sea  in 
ships  have  a  right  to  say  for  themselves  (tem- 
pering the  credulity  of  those  who  have  re- 
mained at  home)  that  the  intellectualist  view 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      157 

of  life  is  altogether  too  easy  and  too  glib.  It 
is  they  who  throw  into  relief  the  deep,  obscure 
conviction  of  the  "plain  man" — commonly  the 
good  man — that  to  endeavor  to  make  life  con- 
form with  ideas  is  in  some  way  to  deprive  the 
world  of  just  those  elements  which  create  char- 
acter and  to  strike  at  an  ideal  forged  through 
immemorial  suffering  and  effort. 

Merely  to  dismiss  as  dumb  folly  an  all  but 
universal  contention  of  this  kind  (no  doubt  in 
the  back  of  people's  minds  when  they  say  that 
socialism,  for  instance,  is  "against  human  na- 
ture") is  to  beg  the  whole  question  of  in- 
tellectualism  itself.  For,  if  it  could  be  conclu- 
sively shown  that  any  view  of  life  not  inci- 
dentally but  by  its  nature  emasculated  life  and 
destroyed  the  roots  of  character,  then  of  course, 
no  matter  how  rationally  self-evident  it  might 
be  and  how  much  confusion  and  suffering  it 
might  avert,  it  would  never  even  justify  its 
own  reason  for  being — it  would  never  suc- 
ceed, the  best  part  of  human  nature  would 
oppose  it  to  the  end  of  time  and  the  intelli- 
gence itself  would  be  discredited.  And  in- 
deed to  the  man  of  experience  rather  than  the 


158     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

man  of  ideas,  just  because  of  his  rich  human- 
ity, just  because  he  never  passes  out  of  the 
personal  range,  belong  the  ideal  things,  mo- 
rality, philosophy,  art.  Like  charity,  these 
things  "begin  at  home";  and  whenever  (as  in 
pragmatism,  when  pragmatism  ceases  to  be  a 
method  and  claims  to  be  an  interpretation  of 
life)  they  are  approached  not  from  the  side  of 
experience  but  from  the  side  of  ideas  they 
cease  to  have  any  real  substance.  Morality  has 
no  substance  when  it  springs  from  the  mind  in- 
stead of  the  conscience,  art  when  it  appeals  to 
the  mind  instead  of  the  perceptions ;  and  as  to 
philosophy,  what  is  any  scheme  of  things  that 
springs  out  of  the  head  of  a  man  who  is  not 
himself  wise?  It  is  a  certain  condemnation  of 
Bergson,  for  example,  that  he  would  never  pass 
muster  in  a  group  of  old  fishermen  smoking 
their  pipes  on  the  end  of  a  pier.  Not  that  they 
would  be  expected  in  any  case  to  know  what 
he  was  talking  about,  but  that  his  fibre  so 
plainly  is  the  fibre  not  of  a  wise  but  of  a  clever 
man  and  that  in  everything,  as  Emerson  said, 
you  must  have  a  source  higher  than  your  tap. 
That  is  why,  as  it  seems  to  me,  Wells  ought 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      159 

not  to  be  considered  from  any  of  these  absolute 
standpoints.  He  has  put  before  us  not  so 
much  a  well-wrought  body  of  artistic  work,  or 
a  moral  programme,  or  an  explanation  of  life 
— words  quite  out  of  place  in  connection  with 
him — as  a  certain  new  spirit,  filled  with  all  sorts 
of  puzzled  intimations  of  a  new  beauty  and 
even  a  new  religion  to  be  generated  out  of  a 
new  order  of  things  that  is  only  glimpsed  at 
present.  And  the  point  I  should  like  to  make 
about  this  spirit  is  that  it  is  entirely  irrelevant 
to  the  values  of  life  as  we  know  them,  but  that 
it  may  in  the  end  prove  to  have  contributed  to 
an  altogether  fresh  basis  for  human  values. 

To  illustrate  what  I  mean  by  this  irrelevance 
as  regards  present  values  and  this  possibility 
as  regards  future  values  let  me  turn  to  that 
long  brilliant  passage  in  The  New  MacMavelli 
where  Remington  goes  from  club  to  club,  pass- 
ing in  review  the  spiritual  possibilities  of  each 
political  party,  and  finds  nothing  but  a  desola- 
tion of  triviality,  pomposity,  confusion,  and 
"utterly  damned  old  men."  Consider  the  con- 
tempt and  hopelessness  that  fill  his  mind.  One 
has  to  forget  entirely  the  ordinary  man's  view 


160     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

of  politics,  sincerely  held  as  it  is;  one  has  to 
think  of  politics  as  a  means  of  straightening 
out  and  re-engendering  a  whole  world  of  con- 
fused anguish  before  one  can  see  any  justifi- 
cation for  this  righteous  wit  and  savage  indig- 
nation against  the  dulness  of  leaders.  Con- 
sidered by  the  current  values  of  life  in  which 
politics  are  regarded  as  an  effect  of  man's  in- 
competence rather  than  as  a  cause  of  his  virtue, 
treated  intensively,  as  a  novelist  of  experience 
rather  than  of  ideas  would  have  treated  them, 
in  what  a  different  light  each  of  these  "utterly 
damned  old  men"  would  appear,  each  one  a 
tiny  epic  of  tragic  and  comic  efforts,  disap- 
pointments, misconceptions,  providing  one  in 
the  end  with  how  much  of  an  excuse  for  blame, 
ridicule  or  contempt!  Everything  indeed  de- 
pends upon  where  a  given  mind  chooses  to  lay 
emphasis.  In  this  scene  Wells  has  judged 
everything  by  his  ideal  of  a  great  society,  just 
as  Conrad,  faced  with  the  same  material, 
would  have  judged  everything  by  his  ideal  of 
personal  character.  Conrad  would  have  used 
those  men  to  give  us  an  understanding  of  life 
as  it  is,  whereas  Wells  has  used  them  simply  to 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      161 

throw  into  relief  his  idea  of  what  life  ought  to 
be.  Conrad  would  have  created  a  work  of  art, 
illustrated  a  moral  programme,  and  interpreted 
life.  Wells,  admittedly  a  clever  caricaturist, 
only  rises  above  the  level  of  a  clever  carica- 
turist according  as  we  accept  the  validity  of 
his  ideal  and  share  the  spirit  in  which  he  writes. 
Like  many  children  of  light,  Wells  is  not  wise 
in  his  own  generation.  But  perhaps  another 
generation  will  justify  him. 

If  Wells  had  lingered  in  these  deep  reali- 
ties of  his  own  time  he  would  have  been  a 
greater  artist.  And  indeed  so  marked  has  been 
his  own  development  away  from  the  world  of 
ideas  and  toward  the  world  of  experience  that 
were  he  to  begin  afresh  it  is  likely  that  he 
would  resemble  the  type  of  novelist  of  which  I 
have  taken  Conrad  as  an  example  far  more 
than  his  former  self.  Of  socialism  he  has 
abandoned  all  the  theories  and  most  of  the 
schemes  and  retained  only  the  frame  of  mind. 
He  has  taken  year  by  year  a  more  intensive 
view  of  life,  he  has  grown  too  conscious  of  the 
inertia  that  impedes  ideas  and  the  overwhelm- 
ing immediacies  of  the  actual  world  to  be  called 


162     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

glib  and  easy  any  more.  "How  little  and  fee- 
ble is  the  life  of  man,  a  thing  of  chances,  pre- 
posterously unable  to  find  the  will  to  realize 
even  the  most  timid  of  its  dreams!"  he  says  in 
one  of  his  latest  novels,  and  if  he  has  kept  alive 
his  faith  in  ideas,  who  will  deny  that  he  has 
begun  to  count  the  cost  of  it? 

From  this  side,  I  think,  it  is  no  longer  possi- 
ble for  anyone  to  assail  him,  so  frankly  has  he 
given  hostages  to  "actuality.'*  It  is  from  the 
other  side,  his  own  side,  and  especially  in  the 
light  of  his  own  ideal,  that  an  answer  is  re- 
quired for  the  slackness  which  has  come  upon 
him  and  which  is  very  marked  in  his  recent  nov- 
els. Is  it  possible  to  ignore  the  fact  that  since 
he  wrote  The  New  Machiavelli  the  work  of 
Wells  has  lived  on  its  capital  and  lost  the  pas- 
sionate curiosity  and  personal  conviction  that 
made  him  the  force  he  was  in  our  epoch?  Al- 
ways unwilling  to  check  his  talent  and  publish 
only  the  results  of  his  genuine  mental  prog- 
ress, he  has  become,  in  spite  of  splendid  mo- 
ments, too  much  of  the  common  professional 
novelist,  dealing  with  levels  and  phases  of  life 
where  he  obviously  does  not  belong,  astray 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      163 

from  his  own  natural  point  of  intense 
contact  with  things.  I  want  to  avoid 
the  usual  habit  of  critics  who  think  it 
their  business  to  put  authors  in  their  places, 
but  is  it  not  a  fact  that  Wells  under- 
stands the  Kippses  and  Pollys  far  better  than 
the  lords  and  ladies  of  England  and  that  he 
was  at  his  best  in  elaborating  a  bridge — a  won- 
derful visionary  bridge — between  the  little 
world  of  dumb  routine  and  the  great  world  of 
spacious  initiatives?  Carlyle  with  his  Great 
Man  theory,  forged  out  of  his  own  travail  and 
weakness,  in  the  end  fell  on  his  knees  before 
the  illusion  of  lordship.  Fifteen  years  ago  one 
might  have  predicted  the  same  future  for  the 
Samurai  of  Wells,  not  because  the  Samurai 
are  themselves  equivocal  but  because  Wells  is 
an  Englishman.  There  so  plainly  to  the  Eng- 
lish mind  the  great  gentlemen  are,  the  men  who 
can  and  the  men  who  never  do !  Towards  this 
Circe  of  the  English  imagination  Wells  has 
travelled  with  a  fatal  consistency,  and  the  re- 
sult to  be  foreseen  was  first  of  all  fatuity  and 
in  the  end  extinction. 

After  he  had  written  The  New  MachiavelU 


164     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

Wells  had  reached  a  point  where  his  ideas,  in 
order  to  be  saved,  had  to  be  rescued  from  him- 
self. To  believe  that  life  can  be  straightened 
out  by  the  intelligence  is  necessarily  to  have 
"travelled  light,"  in  a  measure;  too  much  ex- 
perience is  the  end  of  that  frame  of  mind.  In 
Tono-Bungay  and  The  New  Machiavelli  ideas 
and  experience  met  in  a  certain  invisible  point 
— that  is  the  marvel  which  has  made  these  books 
unique  and,  I  suppose,  permanent;  the  great- 
est possible  faith  in  ideas  was  united  with  the 
greatest  possible  grasp  of  everything  that  im- 
pedes them.  One  had  therefore  a  sense  of 
tragic  struggle,  in  which  the  whole  life  of  our 
time  was  caught  up  and  fiercely  wrestled  with ; 
one  had  the  feeling  that  here  was  the  greatest 
moment  in  the  life  of  a  writer  suddenly  become 
great.  But  with  these  books  some  secret  virtue 
seems  to  have  passed  out  of  Wells.  Since  then 
his  ideas  have  been  hardly  more  than  a  per- 
functory repetition  and  his  experience  more 
and  more  remote  and  unreal ;  and  looking  back 
one  seems  to  discover  something  highly  sym- 
bolic in  the  tragical  conquest  of  ideas  by  pas- 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      165 

sion  with  which  The  New  Machiavelli  con- 
cludes. 

But  indeed  Wells  was  always  a  man  whose 
ideas  were  greater  than  himself.  "I  stumble 
and  flounder,"  says  George  Ponderevo,  "but  I 
know  that  over  all  these  merry  immediate 
things,  there  are  other  things  that  are  great 
and  serene,  very  high,  beautiful  things — the 
reality.  I  haven't  got  it,  but  it's  there  never- 
theless. I'm  a  spiritual  guttersnipe  in  love 
with  unimaginable  goddesses."  And  just  for 
this  reason  the  spirit  which  in  his  great  days 
possessed  him  is  independent  of  any  fate  that 
may  befall  Wells  himself  and  his  art.  More 
than  this,  by  frankly  and  fully  testing  his  ideas 
in  a  lif e-and-death  struggle  with  reality  he  has, 
even  at  the  cost  of  his  own  shipwreck,  removed 
from  the  cause  of  ideas  the  greatest  reproach 
which  has  always  been  brought  against  it. 
Revolutionists,  doctrinaires,  idealogues  have 
notoriously  failed  to  test  the  validity  of  their 
ideas  even  in  the  face  of  their  own  private  pas- 
sions and  confusions ;  they  have  rarely  consid- 
ered for  a  moment  that  their  own  lives  totally 
unfit  them  for  supposing  that  men  are  natu- 


166     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

rally  good  and  that  to  make  reason  prevail  is 
one  of  the  simplest  operations  in  the  world. 
Wells,  on  the  other  hand,  has  consistently 
shown  that  theory  divorced  from  practice  is  a 
mode  of  charlatanism,  that  "love  and  fine  think- 
ing" must  go  together,  and  that  precisely  be- 
cause of  man's  individual  incapacity  to  live,  as 
things  are,  with  equal  honesty  the  life  of  ideas 
and  the  life  of  experience,  the  cause  he  has  at 
heart  must  be  taken  out  of  the  hands  of  the  in- 
dividual and  made  to  form  a  common  imper- 
sonal will  and  purpose  in  the  mind  of  the  race 
as  a  whole. 

Intellectualism,  in  fact,  the  view  that  life 
can  be  determined  by  ideas  (and  of  this  so- 
cialism is  the  essence)  if  it  can  be  justified 
at  all  has  to  be  justified  in  the  face  of  all 
current  human  values.  It  is  based  on  an  as- 
sumption, a  grand  and  generous  assumption, 
I  maintain,  and  one  that  has  to  take  what  is 
called  a  sporting  chance  with  all  the  odds 
against  it.  This  assumption  is,  that  on  the 
whole  human  nature  can  be  trusted  to  take  care 
of  itself  while  the  surplus  energy  of  life,  com- 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      167 

monly  absorbed  in  the  struggle  against  inca- 
pacity, sloth,  perversity,  and  disorder  ("orig- 
inal sin,"  to  sum  it  all  up),  is  released  for  the 
organization  of  a  better  scheme  for  man- 
kind; and  further,  that  this  better  scheme, 
acting  on  a  race  naturally  capable  of  a  rich- 
er and  fuller  life,  will  have  the  effect  on 
men  as  a  whole  that  re-environing  has  on  any 
cramped,  ill-nourished,  unventilated  organism, 
and  that  art,  religion,  morals  (all  that  makes 
up  the  substance  and  meaning  of  life)  instead 
of  being  checked  and  blighted  in  the  process 
will  in  the  end,  strong  enough  to  bear  trans- 
plantation, be  re-engendered  on  a  finer  and 
freer  basis.  This,  in  a  word,  is  the  contention 
of  the  intellectual,  a  splendid  gambler's  chance, 
on  which  the  future  rests,  and  to  which  people 
have  committed  themselves  more  than  they 
know.  It  is  a  bridge  thrown  out  across  the 
void,  resting  at  one  end  on  the  good  intentions 
of  mankind  and  relying  at  the  other  upon  man- 
kind's fulfilling  those  good  intentions.  It  is 
based  like  every  great  enterprise  of  the  modern 
world  upon  credit,  and  its  only  security  is  the 
fact  tKat  men  thus  far  and  on  the  whole  have 


168     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

measured  up  to  each  enlargement  of  their  free- 
dom and  responsibility. 

To  feel  the  force  of  this  one  has  to  think 
of  the  world  as  a  world.  Just  here  has  been  the 
office  of  socialism,  to  show  that  society  is  a  co- 
lossal machine  of  which  we  are  all  parts  and 
that  men  in  the  most  exact  sense  are  members 
one  of  another.  In  the  intellectualist  scheme 
of  things  that  mathematical  proof  has  to  come 
first;  it  has  to  take  root  and  bury  itself  and 
become  the  second  nature  of  humankind  be- 
fore the  new  world  of  instinct  can  spring  out 
of  it  and  come  to  blossom. 

That  has  been  the  office  of  socialism,  and 
just  so  far  as  that  proof  has  been  established 
socialism  has  played  its  part.  Now  the  point 
I  want  to  make  about  Wells  is  that  in  him  one 
sees  already  in  an  almost  precocious  form  the 
second  stage  of  this  process.  In  him  this  new 
world  of  intelligence  is  already  exuberant  with 
instinct;  the  social  machine  has  become  a  per- 
sonality; that  cold  abstraction  the  world  has 
become  in  his  hands  a  throbbing,  breathing, 
living  thing,  as  alive,  awake,  aware  of  itself,  as 
engaging,  adventurous,  free,  critical,  well- 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      169 

primed,  continent,  and  all-of-a-piece  as  a 
strong  man  running  a  race.  People  never  felt 
nature  as  a  personality  before  Wordsworth 
showed  them  that  it  was,  or  a  locomotive  be- 
fore Kipling  wrote  Me  Andrew's  Hymn;  and 
it  seems  to  me  that  Wells  has  done  for  the  so- 
cial organism  very  much  what  Wordsworth 
did  for  nature,  discovering  in  a  thing  previ- 
ously felt  to  be  inanimate  a  matter  for  art  and 
a  basis  for  religious  emotion. 

But  if  the  world  is  a  personality  it  is  a  very 
stupid,  sluggish,  unawakened  personality,  dif- 
fering from  nature  in  this  respect,  that  we  our- 
selves compose  the  whole  of  it  and  have  it  in 
our  hands  to  do  what  we  will  with  it.  It  has  al- 
ways been  out  of  joint,  a  great  slipshod  Levia- 
than, at  sixes  and  sevens,  invertebrate  and  fun- 
gus-brained. Just  so  is  the  average  man,  sunk 
in  routine,  oppressed  with  microscopic  tasks 
that  give  birth  one  to  another,  his  stomach  at 
war  with  his  head,  his  legs  unwilling  to  exer- 
cise him,  resentful  of  his  own  capacity  not  to  be 
dull.  But  certain  happier  moments  bring  him 
an  exuberant  quickened  life  in  which  routine 
tasks  fall  nimbly  from  his  fingers  and  he  is 


170     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

aware  of  a  wide,  humorous,  generous,  enlight- 
ened vision  of  things ;  he  pulls  himself  together, 
his  parts  reinforce  one  another,  his  mind 
wakens,  his  heart  opens,  his  fancy  stirs,  he  is 
all  generosity  and  happiness,  capable  of  any- 
thing that  is  disinterested,  fine,  and  becoming 
to  a  free  man.  It  is  in  these  moments  that  in- 
dividual men  have  done  all  the  things  which 
make  up  the  real  history  of  this  planet. 

If  individual  men  are  capable  of  this  amaz- 
ing experience,  then  why  not  the  world?  That 
is  the  spirited  question  Wells  has  propounded 
in  a  hundred  different  forms,  in  his  earlier, 
more  theoretical,  and  more  optimistic  writings 
suggesting  that  society  as  a  whole  should  turn 
over  a  new  leaf,  and  even  picturing  it  as  doing 
so,  in  his  later  work,  more  experienced  and  less 
hopeful  but  with  a  compensating  fervor,  pic- 
turing the  attempt  of  delegated  individuals  to 
act  on  society's  behalf.  I  do  not  wish  at  this 
point  to  become  pious  and  solemn  in  tone ;  that 
would  be  inept  in  connection  with  Wells.  But 
I  do  wish  to  make  it  plain  that  if  he  is  devoid 
of  those  grander  traits  which  spring  from  the 
sense  of  being  "tenon'd  and  mortised"  upon 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      171 

something  beyond  change,  if  his  strength  lies 
wholly  in  his  intelligence,  the  intelligence  itself 
in  Wells  is  an  amazing  organ,  a  troubled  and 
rapturous  organ,  an  organ  as  visionary  and 
sensitive  as  the  soul  of  a  Christian  saint.  That 
is  why  I  have  said  that  in  him  the  new  world, 
governed  by  the  intelligence,  is  already  exuber- 
ant with  instinct;  and  anyone  who  doubts  that 
he  has  lavished  a  very  genuine  religious  instinct 
upon  the  social  process  itself  and  in  the  dream 
of  a  society  free,  magnanimous  and  seemly, 
should  turn  to  the  passage  where  he  describes 
Machiavelli,  after  the  heat  and  pettiness  of  the 
day,  retiring  into  his  chamber  alone,  putting 
on  his  dress  of  ceremony  and  sitting  down  be- 
fore his  table  in  the  presence  of  that  magnifi- 
cent thought. 

The  mass  of  men  have  acted  more  consist- 
ently than  they  know  on  the  principle  that  the 
whole  world  is  nothing  in  comparison  with  one 
soul,  for  their  politics  and  economic  science, 
solemn  as  they  appear,  are  as  frivolous  and 
secondary  as  if  they  actually  did  believe  fer- 
vently that  heaven  is  their  true  home  and  the 
world  a  bad  business  of  little  account.  In  all 


172     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

that  concerns  private  virtue  and  the  private 
life,  in  religion,  poetry,  their  lawyer,  their  doc- 
tor, their  broker,  they  exact  the  last  degree  of 
excellence  and  efficiency,  but  they  trust  to  the 
blind  enterprise  of  individual  men  to  push  man- 
kind chaotically  forward  little  by  little.  We 
are  in  fact  so  wonderfully  made  that  if  our 
grocer  tells  us  in  the  morning  that  he  has  no 
fresh  eggs  he  throwjs  us  into  a  deeper  despon- 
dency than  six  readings  of  the  Inferno  could 
ever  do.  And  that  explains  why  so  few  people 
can  extend  themselves  imaginatively  into  the 
greater  circles  that  surround  them,  why,  on  the 
social  plane,  we  never  think  of  demanding  wis- 
dom from  politicians,  why  we  never  dream  of 
remembering  that  they  should  belong  to  the 
august  family  of  Plutarch,  why  it  is  not  the 
profound  views  of  wise  men  and  the  brilliant 
discoveries  of  science  that  fill  the  newspapers, 
but  the  incredibly  banal  remarks  of  this  presi- 
dent and  that  prime  minister,  why  presidents 
and  prime  ministers  in  a  society  that  lives  from 
hand  to  mouth  are  so  much  more  important 
than  poets  and  prophets,  and  why  statesman- 
ship has  gathered  about  itself  a  literature  so 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      173 

incomparably  trivial  and  dull.  Socialists,  in- 
deed, just  because  they  alone  are  serious  about 
the  world,  are  apt  to  be  the  least  mundane  in 
spirit;  they  are,  as  Wells  has  himself  said, 
"other-worldly"  about  the  world  itself. 

But  indeed  I  should  make  a  mistake  were  I 
to  over-stress  the  solemnities  that  underlie  the 
spirit  of  Wells.  In  tone  he  is  more  profane 
than  sacred,  that  is  to  say  he  is  a  realist.  He 
wants  a  world  thrillingly  alive,  curious,  exer- 
cised, magnanimous,  with  all  its  dim  corners 
lighted  up,  shaken  out  of  its  dulness  and  com- 
placency, keen,  elastic,  tempered  like  a  fine 
blade — the  counterpart  on  a  grand  scale  of 
what  he  most  admires  in  the  individual.  "Ste- 
phen," says  Lady  Mary  in  The  Passionate 
Friends,  "promise  me.  Whatever  you  become, 
you  promise  and  swear  here  and  now  never  to 
be  grey  and  grubby,  never  to  be  humpy  and 
snuffy,  never  to  be  respectable  and  modest  and 
dull  and  a  little  fat,  like — like  everybody." 
And  in  First  and  Last  Things  he  gives  the 
other  side  of  the  medal: 

Much  more  to  me  than  the  desire  to  live  is  the  desire 
to  taste  life.  I  am  not  happy  until  I  have  done  and  felt 


174     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

things.  I  want  to  get  as  near  as  I  can  to  the  thrill  of  a 
dog  going  into  a  fight  or  the  delight  of  a  bird  in  the  air. 
And  not  simply  in  the  heroic  field  of  war  and  the  air  do 
I  want  to  understand.  I  want  to  know  something  of  the 
jolly  wholesome  satisfaction  that  a  hungry  pig  must  find 
in  its  wash.  I  want  to  get  the  fine  quintessence  of  that. 

It  stands  to  reason  that  a  spirit  of  this  kind 
does  not  consort  with  any  pre-arranged  pocket 
ground-plan,  so  to  speak,  of  the  world  as  it 
should  be.  Of  this,  to  be  sure,  he  is  often  ac- 
cused, and  he  has  given  us  a  humorous  version 
of  his  Utopia  as  it  may  appear  to  certain  of 
his  contemporaries: 

Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton  mocks  valiantly  and  passion- 
ately, I  know,  against  an  oppressive  and  obstinately  re- 
current anticipation  of  himself  in  Socialist  hands,  hair 
clipped,  meals  of  a  strictly  hygienic  description  at  regu- 
lar hours,  a  fine  for  laughing,  not  that  he  would  want  to 
laugh,  and  austere  exercises  in  several  of  the  more  metal- 
lic virtues  daily.  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  conception  is 
rather  in  the  nature  of  a  nightmare,  a  hopeless,  herrid, 
frozen  flight  from  the  pursuit  of  Mr.  Sidney  Webb  and 
myself,  both  of  us  short,  inelegant  men,  but  for  all  that 
terribly  resolute,  indefatigable,  incessant  to  capture  him, 
to  drag  him  off  to  a  mechanical  Utopia,  and  then  to  take 
his  thumb-mark  and  his  name,  number  him  distinctly  in 
indelible  ink,  and  let  him  loose  (under  inspection)  in  a 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      175 

world  of  great  round  lakes  of  blue  lime-water  and  vistas 
of  white  sanitary  tiling. 

That  is  a  not  unjust  parody  of  Wells's  Uto- 
pia as  it  would  be  if  he  had  remained  in  the 
circle  of  his  Fabian  friends.  Being  what  he 
is,  it  bears  much  the  same  relation  to  his  idea 
as  that  world  of  harps  and  crowns  and  milk 
and  honey  bore  in  the  mediaeval  imagination 
to  the  idea  of  heaven.  You  have  to  mingle 
these  notions  with  your  experience  of  human 
hearts  to  realize  the  inadequacy  of  symbols. 
Wells,  I  suspect,  has  a  fondness  for  white  sani- 
tary tiling,  just  as  plenty  of  good  Christians 
have  found  in  milk  and  honey  a  foretaste  of 
unthinkable  felicity;  but  when  it  comes  to  the 
actual  architecture  and  domestic  arrangements 
of  paradise  they  are  both  quite  willing  to  take 
on  trust  the  accommodating  good  will  of  God 
and  man.  Somehow  or  other,  by  the  time  we 
have  got  there,  we  shall  not  find  it  monotonous 
— to  this,  at  least,  one's  faith,  whatever  it  may 
be,  ought  to  be  equal. 

I  have  given  too  few  quotations  in  this  book, 
and  now  I  have  left  it  to  a  point  where  if  I 
give  any  at  all  it  must  be  to  illustrate  less  the 


176     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

art  of  Wells  as  a  thing  by  itself  than  a  train  of 
thought.  He  is  at  his  best  in  brief  scenes, 
where  all  his  gifts  of  humor,  satire,  characteri- 
zation and  phrase  come  to  a  head  (think,  for 
example,  of  Aunt  Plessington's  speech,  the 
funeral  of  Mr.  Polly's  father,  the  pages  deal- 
ing with  Cousin  Nicodemus  Frapp's  house- 
hold, and  the  somewhat  prolonged  episode  of 
the  "reet  Staffordshire"  cousins  in  The  New 
MachiavelU) ;  and  indeed,  so  insistent  is  his 
point  of  view  that  in  every  one  of  these  epi- 
sodes one  finds  in  opposition  the  irrepressible 
new  world  of  Wells  and  the  stagnant  world 
out  of  which  it  springs.  One  of  the  best  of 
these  scenes,  luckily,  is  brief  and  connected 
enough  to  be  quoted  as  a  whole.  It  is  a  picture 
of  the  tea-hour  in  the  servants'  hall  at  Blades- 
over  House. 

I  sat  among  these  people  on  a  high,  hard,  early  Gre- 
gorian chair,  trying  to  exist,  like  a  feeble  seedling  amidst 
great  rocks,  and  my  mother  sat  with  an  eye  upon  me, 
resolute  to  suppress  the  slightest  manifestation  of  vi- 
tality. It  was  hard  on  me,  but  perhaps  it  was  also  hard 
upon  these  rather  over-fed,  ageing,  pretending  people, 
that  my  youthful  restlessness  and  rebellious  unbelieving 
eyes  should  be  thrust  in  among  their  dignities. 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      177 

Tea  lasted  for  nearly  three-quarters  of  an  hour,  and 
I  sat  it  out  perforce;  and  day  after  day  the  talk  was 
exactly  the  same. 

"Sugar,  Mrs.  Mackridge?"  my  mother  used  to  ask. 
"Sugar,  Mrs.  Latude-Fernay  ?" 

The  word  sugar  would  stir  the  mind  of  Mrs.  Mack- 
ridge.  "They  say,"  she  would  begin,  issuing  her  procla- 
mation— at  least  half  her  sentences  began  "they  say" — 
"sugar  is  fatt-an-ing,  nowadays.  Many  of  the  best  peo- 
ple do  not  take  it  at  all." 

"Not  with  their  tea,  ma'am,"  said  Rabbits,  intelli- 
gently. 

"Not  with  anaything,"  said  Mrs.  Mackridge,  with  an 
air  of  crushing  repartee,  and  drank. 

"What  won't  they  say  next  ?"  said  Miss  Fison. 

"They  do  say  such  things !"  said  Mrs.  Booch. 

"They  say,"  said  Mrs.  Mackridge,  inflexibly,  "the  doc- 
tors are  not  recomm-an-ding  it  now." 

My   Mother:     "No,   ma'am?" 

Mrs.  Mackridge:    "No,  ma'am." 

Then,  to  the  table  at  large:  "Poor  Sir  Roderick,  be- 
fore he  died,  consumed  great  quan-ta-ties  of  sugar.  I 
have  sometimes  fancied  it  may  have  hastened  his  end." 

This  ended  the  first  skirmish.  A  certain  gloom  of 
manner  and  a  pause  was  considered  due  to  the  sacred 
memory  of  Sir  Roderick. 

"George,"  said  my  mother,  "don't  kick  the  chair !" 

Then,  perhaps,  Mrs.  Booch  would  produce  a  favorite 
piece  from  her  repertoire.  "The  evenings  are  drawing 
out  nicely,"  she  would  say,  or  if  the  season  was  decadent, 
"How  the  evenings  draw  in !"  It  was  an  invaluable  re- 


178     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

mark  to  her;  I  do  not  know  how  she  would  have  got 
along  without  it. 

My  mother,  who  sat  with  her  back  to  the  window, 
would  always  consider  it  due  to  Mrs.  Booch  to  turn 
about  and  regard  the  evening  in  the  act  of  elongation 
or  contraction,  whichever  phase  it  might  be. 

A  brisk  discussion  of  how  long  we  were  to  the  longest 
or  shortest  day  would  ensue,  and  die  away  at  last  ex- 
hausted. 


There  is,  I  think,  a  special  sort  of  con- 
nection between  Wells  and  America ;  and  there 
are  times  when  it  seems  to  me  that  were  the 
spirit  of  America  suddenly  to  become  critical 
of  itself  it  would  resemble  nothing  in  the  world 
so  much  as  the  spirit  of  Wells  magnified  by 
many  diameters.  His  instincts  are  all  as  it 
were  instincts  of  the  intelligence;  his  mind, 
like  the  American  mind,  is  a  disinherited  mind, 
not  connected  with  tradition,  thinking  and  act- 
ing de  novo  because  there  is  nothing  to  prevent 
it  from  doing  so.  Perfectly  American  is  his 
alertness,  his  versatility,  adaptability,  his  thor- 
ough-going pragmatism,  perfectly  American 
are  the  disconcerting  questions  that  he  asks 
("Is  the  Navy  bright?").  Perfectly  Ameri- 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      179 

can  is  his  view  of  the  traditional  English  ideal 
of  human  nature — that  strange  compound 
of  good  intentions,  homely  affection,  stubborn 
strength,  insensibility  to  ideas,  irrational  self- 
sacrifice,  domestic  despotism,  a  strong  sense  of 
property  in  things  and  people,  stupidity, 
sweetness  and  confusion  of  mind — an  ideal 
through  which  it  has  been  one  of  his  never- 
failing  delights  to  send  electric  shocks.  And 
indeed  the  type  of  character  he  has  presented 
in  his  heroes,  in  Remington,  Trafford  and  Pon- 
derevo,  is  a  type  to  be  found  perhaps  more 
plentifully  than  elsewhere  in  American  re- 
search bureaus,  hospitals  and  laboratories.  He 
thinks  and  feels  critically  so  many  of  the 
things  America  lives  and  does  unconsciously. 
Perhaps  in  this  distinction  lies  the  immediate 
value  of  his  criticism  for  us. 

For  in  his  mind  Americans  can  see  them- 
selves reflected  in  the  light  of  what  they  chiefly 
need,  that  synthetic  motive  without  which  a 
secular  and  industrial  race  is  as  devoid  of  ani- 
mating morality  as  a  swarm  of  flies.  This 
want,  most  obvious  on  the  political  and  eco- 
nomic plane,  is  indeed  fundamental.  Wells 


180     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

has  grasped  it  from  many  different  angles  but 
never  with  more  point  than  in  his  essay  The 
American  Population.  Consider  this  passage, 
where  he  takes  as  a  text  one  of  Arthur  Bris- 
bane's editorials  in  the  "New  York  Journal": 

It  is  the  voice  of  the  American  tradition  strained  to 
the  utmost  to  make  itself  audible  to  the  new  world,  and 
cracking  into  italics  and  breaking  into  capitals  with  the 
strain.  The  rest  of  that  enormous  bale  of  paper  is  elo- 
quent of  a  public  void  of  moral  ambitions,  lost  to  any 
sense  of  comprehensive  things,  deaf  to  ideas,  impervious 
to  generalizations,  a  public  which  has  carried  the  con- 
ception of  freedom  to  its  logical  extreme  of  entire  indi- 
vidual detachment.  These  telltale  columns  deal  all  with 
personality  and  the  drama  of  personal  life.  They  wit- 
ness to  no  interest  but  the  interest  in  intense  individual 
experiences.  The  engagements,  the  love  affairs,  the 
scandals  of  conspicuous  people  are  given  in  pitiless  de- 
tail in  articles  adorned  with  vigorous  portraits  and  sen- 
sational pictorial  comments.  Even  the  eavesdroppers 
who  write  this  stuff  strike  the  personal  note,  and  their 
heavily  muscular  portraits  frown  beside  the  initial  letter. 
Murders  and  crimes  are  worked  up  to  the  keenest  pitch 
of  realization,  and  any  new  indelicacy  in  fashionable 
costume,  any  new  medical  device  or  cure,  any  new  dance 
or  athleticism,  any  new  breach  in  the  moral  code,  any 
novelty  in  sea-bathing  or  the  woman's  seat  on  horse- 
back, or  the  like,  is  given  copious  and  moving  illustra- 
tion, stirring  headlines,  and  eloquent  reprobation.  There 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      181 

is  a  colored  supplement  of  knock-about  fun,  written 
chiefly  in  the  quaint  dialect  of  the  New  York  slums.  It 
is  a  language  from  which  "th"  has  vanished,  and  it  pre- 
sents a  world  in  which  the  kicking  by  a  mule  of  an  end- 
less succession  of  victims  is  an  inexhaustible  joy  to 
young  and  old.  "Dat  ole  Maud !"  There  is  a  smaller 
bale  dealing  with  sport.  In  the  advertisement  columns 
one  finds  nothing  of  books,  nothing  of  art;  but  great 
choice  of  bust  developers,  hair  restorers,  nervous  tonics, 
clothing  sales,  self-contained  flats,  and  business  oppor- 
tunities. .  .  . 

Individuality  has,  in  fact,  got  home  to  itself,  and,  as 
people  say,  taken  off  its  frills.  .  .  .  The  "New  York 
American"  represents  a  clientele  to  be  counted  by  the 
hundred  thousand,  manifestly  with  no  other  solicitudes, 
just  burning  to  live  and  living  to  burn. 

Now  that  is  a  very  fair  picture,  not  merely 
of  popular  America  but  of  the  whole  contem- 
porary phase  of  popular  civilization,  uprooted 
from  the  state  of  instinct,  intensive  experience 
and  the  immemorial  immediacies  of  duty  and 
the  soil.  To  the  artist  and  the  moralist  it  is  a 
cause  of  hopeless  pessimism,  as  any  civilization 
must  be  which  has  lost  touch  with  all  its  values 
and  been  rationalized  to  the  point  of  anarchy. 
For  this  there  is  only  one  salvation.  If  civili- 
zation has  lost  the  faculty  of  commanding  it- 


182     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

self  and  pulling  itself  together  in  its  individual 
aspect,  it  must  pull  itself  together  collectively. 
That  essentially  is  the  fighting  chance  of  in- 
tellectualism,  the  hope  that,  inasmuch  as  the 
world  has  already  lost  touch  with  experience 
and  committed  itself  to  a  regime  of  ideas,  by 
organizing  this  regime  of  ideas  and  by  mechan- 
izing so  far  as  possible  the  material  aspect  of 
things,  the  values  of  life  can  be  re-engendered 
on  a  fresh  basis.  From  this  follows  the  oft- 
repeated  phrase  of  Wells  that  the  chief  want 
of  the  American  people  is  a  "sense  of  the 
state."  For  the  peril  and  the  hope  of  Ameri- 
can life  (granting  that,  as  things  are,  society 
must  be  brought  into  some  kind  of  coherence 
before  morality,  art  and  religion  can  once  more 
attain  any  real  meaning)  lies  in  the  fact  that 
while  at  present  Americans  are  aware  of  them- 
selves only  as  isolated  individuals  they  are  un- 
consciously engaged  in  works  of  an  almost  ap- 
palling significance  for  the  future  of  society. 
A  Trust  is  a  work  of  this  kind,  and  whether 
it  is  to  be  a  gigantic  good  or  a  gigantic  evil  de- 
pends wholly  upon  whether  its  controlling 
minds  are  more  conscious  of  their  individual  or 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      183 

their  social  function.  The  mechanism  of  so- 
ciety in  America  is  already  developed  to  a  very 
high  point;  what  is  wanting,  and  without  this 
everything  is  wanting,  is  an  understanding  of 
the  right  function  of  this  mechanism.  So 
much  does  it  all  depend  upon  whether  the  finan- 
cial mind  can  subdue  itself  to  the  greater  mind 
of  the  race. 

If  the  future  is  anywhere  going  to  follow 
the  lines  that  Wells  has  suggested  for  it — 
and  being  an  opportunist  his  aims  are  always 
in  touch  with  agreeable  probabilities — it  will 
most  likely  be  in  America.  He  has  lately  given 
his  idea  of  what  the  State  should  aim  to  be — 
"planned  as  an  electric  traction  system  is 
planned,  without  reference  to  pre-existing  ap- 
paratus, upon  scientific  lines" ;  an  idea  remark- 
ably of  a  piece  with  the  American  imagination 
and  one  which  the  American  imagination  is 
perfectly  capable  of  translating  into  fact. 
American,  too,  are  the  methods  in  which  Wells 
has  come  to  believe  for  bringing  the  Great 
State  into  existence.  His  conviction  is  that 
socialism  will  come  through  an  enlightened  in- 
dividualism, outside  the  recognized  govern- 


184     THE  WORLD  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 

mental  institutions,  and  that  the  ostensible 
States  will  be  superseded  virtually  by  informal 
centres  of  gravity  quite  independent  of  them. 
America  alone  at  present  justifies  this  specula- 
tion. For  the  centre  of  gravity  in  American 
affairs  has  always  been  extra-governmental, 
and  consistently  in  America  where  wealth  gath- 
ers there  also  the  institutions  of  socialism 
spring  into  being.  The  rudiments  of  the  So- 
cialist State,  falsely  based  as  they  are  but  al- 
ways tending  to  subvert  this  false  basis,  are 
certainly  to  be  found,  if  anywhere,  in  the 
Rockefeller  Institute,  the  Carnegie  and  Rus- 
sell Sage  Foundations,  the  endowed  universi- 
ties and  bureaus  of  research,  and  in  the  type  of 
men  they  breed.  Consider  the  following  pas- 
sage from  The  Passionate  Friends  and  the 
character  of  the  American,  Gidding,  which  is 
indicated  in  it: 


To  Gidding  it  was  neither  preposterous  nor  insuf- 
ferably magnificent  that  we  should  set  about  a  propa- 
ganda of  all  science,  all  knowledge,  all  philosophical 
and  political  ideas,  round  about  the  habitable  globe.  His 
mind  began  producing  concrete  projects  as  a  firework 
being  lit  produces  sparks,  and  soon  he  was  "figuring 


THE  SPIRIT  OF  WELLS      185 

out"  the  most  colossal  of  printing  and  publishing  pro- 
jects, as  a  man  might  work  out  the  particulars  for  an 
alteration  to  his  bathroom.  It  was  so  entirely  natural 
to  him,  it  was  so  entirely  novel  to  me,  to  go  on  from  the 
proposition  that  understanding  was  the  primary  need  of 
humanity  to  the  systematic  organization  of  free  publish- 
ing, exhaustive  discussion,  intellectual  stimulation.  He 
set  about  it  as  a  company  of  pharmacists  might  organize 
the  distribution  of  some  beneficial  cure. 

"Say,  Stratton,"  he  said,  after  a  conversation  that  had 
seemed  to  me  half  fantasy,  "let's  do  it." 

It  is  perfectly  possible  in  fact  that  socialism 
will  come  into  being  first  of  all  under  the  form 
of  Cecil  Rhodes's  dream,  as  a  secret  order  of 
millionaires  "promoting"  not  their  own  aims 
but  society  itself.  That  is  one  of  the  possibili- 
ties at  least  that  lie  in  what  Wells  has  called 
the  "gigantic  childishness"  of  the  American 
mind. 


INDEX 


America,    The    Future    in,      Common    Sense    of    War- 


35,  136 
America,  Wells  and,  176- 

185 
American  Population,  The, 

180-181 

Ann  Veronica,  121 
Anticipations,   80-83 
Arnold,  Matthew,  15,   16, 

17,   54,  97,    126 

Bacon,    135 
Beerbohm,   Max,   174 
Belloc,  Hilaire,  62 
Bergson,    Henri,    68,    94, 

158 

Brisbane,  Arthur,  180 
Brook  Farm,  124 

Carlyle,  88,  163 
Catholic    Church,   the,   97 
Cato,  14 

Chesterton,  G.  K.,  42,  174 
Chicago,   13 

Comet,    In    the    Days    of 
the,  24 


fare,  The,  126 
Comte,  73 
Confucius,  88 
Conrad,  Joseph,  153-161 
Creative  Evolution,  68 

Dante,  149 

Darwin,  92 

De  Foe,  29,  135 

Dickens,   135 

Discovery   of   the   Future, 

The,  37,  90 
Diirer,   145 

Emerson,  123,  158 
Empire  of  the  Ants,  The, 

51-52 

Erasmus,  97 

Ethics   and  Evolution,  47 
Fabian  Society,  41,  62,  66, 

123,  175 
First    and    Last     Things, 

22,  72,  93-99,  100,  116, 

173 


187 


188 


INDEX 


First   Men  in   the   Moon, 

The,  64 
Food   of   the    Gods,   The, 

75,  83-87,  89,  108 
Fortnightly  Review,   The, 

92 
Francis,  St.,  43 

Goethe,  73 

Great  State,  The,  64-65 

Grimm's  Fairy  Tales,  149 

Hardy,  Thomas,  155 

Hearn,  Lafcadio,  103 

Heraclitus,  36 

Hero,  The,  88 

History  of  Mr.  Polly,  The, 

24,  52 
Huxley,  47 

Inferno,  The,  137,  172 
Invisible  Man,  The,  26 
Island    of    Dr.    Moreau, 
The,  31 

James,   William,    94,    112 
Japanese,  the,  102-104 
Jeffries,  Richard,  41 
Johnson,  Dr.,  147,  148 


Kipling,     Rudyard,     127, 

169 
Kipps,     27,      29,      54-56, 

109 

Leonardo  da  Vinci,  145 

Leopardi,  28 

Love  and  Mr.  Lewisham, 

53-54,  121 
Luther,  97 

Macaulay,  53 
Machiavelli,  13,  148,   171 
Mankind   in   the    Making, 

74-75,  100 

Marcus  Aurelius,  146 
Marriage,     101,     114-116, 

121,  137,  140 
Michael  Angelo,  145,  146 
Modern  Utopia,  A,  73-77, 

83,  99,  102,  112,  121 
Montessori,  Madame,  75 
Morris,  William,  73 

Me  Andrew's  Hymn,   169 
New  Machiavelli,  The,  48, 
78-79,    112,    121,    127, 
128,  137,  145,  159-160, 
162,  163,  164,  165,  176 
Newman,  Cardinal,  99 


INDEX 


189 


New  Republican,  the,  88, 
89,  102,  116,  117,  118 
News  from  Nowhere,  73 
New  Worlds  for  Old,  45 
Nietzsche,  88,  89 

Our  Liberal  Practitioners, 
16 

Passionate  Friends,  The, 
44,  45,  68,  121,  128, 
173,  184 

Plato,  13,  14 

Plutarch,  148 

Rabelais,  13,  75,  89,  148 
Rasselas,  128 
Rediscovery  of  the  Unique, 

The,  92 

Rhodes,  Cecil,  185 
Robinson   Crusoe,   29 

Samurai,  the,   79,  83,  88, 
99,  102,  104,  105,  116, 
122,  123,  133,  163 
Scepticism  of  the  Instru- 
ment, 93 

Schopenhauer,  117,  141 
Servile  State,  The,  62 
Shakespeare,  13,   149 


Shaw,  Bernard,  12,  13,  14, 

135 
Sleeper  Awakes,  The,  35, 

51,  57 

So-Called   Science   of  So- 
ciology,  The,  71 
Sorel,  Georges,  127 
Spencer,  Herbert,  73 
Story     of     the    Days     to 

Come,  A,  26 
Superman,  the,  88-90 
Superior  Man,  the,  88 
Swift,  64 

Taine,  H.  A.,  12 

Thoreau,  106 

Time  Machine,  The,  9,  34, 

50 

Tolstoy,  67,  155 
Tono-Bungay,  56-60,  108, 

109,  H4,  121,  142,  164, 

176,  178 

Verne,  Jules,  19 

Ward,  Mrs.  Humphry,  65 
Webb,  Sidney,  62,  174 
Wheels    of    Chance,    The, 

109 

Whitman,  Walt,  88,  134 
Wordsworth,  35,   169 
Worms  Cathedral,  150 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A     000710192     6 


